by Haitham A. El-Ghareeb

Business agility is a new paradigm that is a solution for maintaining enterprise competitive advantage. Business improvement approaches, such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, and Workflow Management Systems attempted to satisfy business agility concepts and requirements, but suffered from fatal limitations like lack of concepts definition and measurement, lack of practical implementation, and failure to support ongoing change. The three business improvement approaches realized the need for Business Process Management (BPM) that is the key to business agility. Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are information systems that enable implementation of BPM. Current IT infrastructure and information systems architecture do not satisfy BPMS objectives. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a design pattern addresses technical agility that satisfies BPMS objectives in order to achieve business agility.

This paper presents a coupling model of Business Process Management System and Service Oriented Architecture in order to satisfy process and technical agility aspects of business agility. Proposed model utilizes standards available for mapping BPM concepts via BPMS into SOA, and consists of three layers: Business, Business Services, and Application Services. Business layer enables business executives to handle business processes as information, BPMS resides in this layer. Business services layer is the layer that maps BPM concepts and requirements addressed by BPMS into SOA based IT infrastructure and enterprise information systems. Application Services layer holds the core services ready to be consumed by different BPMSs and shared among enterprises.