Friday, November 11, 2005

Visual COBOL and Process SOA

I just read this piece on SOA and process it contains the line

"It turns out that what BPM terms as 'processes' is, in reality, a superset of the 'services' concept of SOA"

Now I have to take rather big issue with this as the concept that Process is a superset of Service means that at the top of the tree process is invoked and process is the primacy in an architecture. To me this traditional BPM thinking sums up why lots of BPM projects fail. Services have to be the primacy in an architecture (if they have a hierachy) as they provide the containment and structure for process and the link between process, workflow, orchestration, integration, technical implmentation and all the other elements. Services enable other approaches like Agent BDI (Beliefs Drivers Intent) to be integrated rather than relying on linear decision processes.

When will BPM people learn that containers are needed to link elements not just a series of Visual COBOL scripts that assume that everything is best done in a process. Its exactly the same as those folks who railed against OO in the 80s and 90s and preferred procedural code.

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