BPM on Top of SOA: Experiences from the Financial Industry

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) forms an ideal infrastructure for Business Process Management as applications are invoked using standard interfaces and protocols. Automatic services can be composed together with human tasks into complex business processes that cross departmental borders and integrate customer and partner processes. Despite the current hype around SOA and BPM, reports on industrial experiences are still very limited. This paper presents results from empirical studies on adopting BPM and SOA throughout the last 4 years in the IT organization of Danske Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in northern Europe and a pioneer in adopting SOA. The study shows the benefit from automating a traditional business process using BPM and SOA, but it also reveals several challenges, technical and organizational, of converting traditional development into serviceand process-oriented development.