The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) layer represents the use of services as a layer of abstraction between Line of Business (LOB) systems and the applications that use them. This layer addresses the challenge of integrating new systems with legacy systems, and also provides ways to update and replace existing systems while minimizing the change’s negative impact. The SOA and BPM layer also covers gathering individual services into composite services. These new services provide new capabilities that let you build robust, connected, service-oriented applications. By using SOA and BPM, you can abstract, optimize, and automate your business processes to help IT quickly adapt to changing business conditions. In the context of the Platform Vision model, the SOA and BPM layer creates a services “wrapper” around existing LOB systems to make these systems available for use in other systems and business processes. This layer helps IT transform the typically diverse array of complex systems and applications that make up a company’s LOB systems into a network of integrated, automated, and highly flexible resources.

An example of a SOA & BPM capability would be to create a unified, standardized software interface to the book / bill / ship process, each of which may be run by different systems with different interfaces. The unified SOA interface allows, for example, Microsoft Office applications such as InfoPath to interact with it and provide end users with a set of create highly flexible sales and shipping documents.

Architectural pre-requisites: Infrastructure, Security, Data, IT Process

Architectural recommendations:

Solution patterns SOA and BPM enables: Web and Social Computing, Data, ECM and Collaboration, Business Intelligence, User Experience, Integrated Communications