Usage of SOA and BPM changes the roles and the way of thinking in development

Abstract

The processes in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems were automatized in the past several years. The evolution of the automation started with process flows, followed by role based task separation. In the same time the systems started to decouple the monolith solutions to smaller pieces to create more flexible components from them. This approach leads the ERP systems to build and offer services for collaborative purposes. The web enablement provided more power with the Web Service technology to drive the technology to follow the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) design paradigm. The services orientation step over the system and sometime the company boundaries and require integrations on different level. One of these integration layers is the level of composites, where new application above the services can be built. Another layer is the process engine, where the services can be linked together into enhanced workflows defining backend and human activities. This layer is defined as Business Process Management (BPM) for business application. This paper intends to show the requirement of SOA implementation requirements from human point of view and describes the different thinking in design, development and end-user, when BPM and composites are in use.