Within any organization, communication between the core business operations and the IT group has traditionally been a challenging and adversarial relationship. Most miscommunications between the two groups result from misunderstandings related to software and other issues. Now the gap between the business IT layers is beginning to close.

“My programmer doesn’t understand me! This software doesn’t do what I need it to!” The deep sighs from the business side of an organization are a familiar sound. Standardized applications are not a perfect fit for the desired business processes, and customized applications are costly and quickly outdistanced by real environmental conditions. Management and departmental criticism of a company’s application software is stirred up regularly due to the high cost of rolling it out as well as a lack of flexibility for processes, which hampers dynamic business development.

This disconnect can be traced back to fundamental problems in the implementation of technical process requirements in business management applications: for a long time, there was no method with sufficient semantics to represent business processes coherently for professional users that could also meet the technical requirements of mapping the processes in the software. Now with service-oriented architectures (SOA), a new chapter is beginning in which real business processes are taking center stage in application development. The combination of business process models and SOA will close the gap between business management problems and IT implementation.

In comparison to earlier revs, the new SOA-based application software allows dynamic design and rapid customization of corporate business processes. Now, business management process models take services to the application system’s physical processes and orchestrates them accordingly. Before discussing SOA and its implications for the future, a review of the past is in order.