The perceived war between BPM and SOA cited by Christopher Koch, "The New Technology Weapons of Choice in the Continuing War Between IT and the Business," is a competition between specialists. As suggested by Bruce Silver in "The Phony War between BPM and SOA," BPM people and SOA people are not concerned about different things, they are concerned about the same thing from different perspectives. The alignment of these perspectives is a critical opportunity for the business.

A business process is an execution of activities that produces business value. Typically, a business process is initiated by a request and a result is returned. This corresponds to a service in a service oriented architecture (SOA). A service is requested across an organizational boundary to apply a capability that provides business value. A service focuses on making a capability available while a business process focuses on how a capability is applied.

We should distinguish between a service-the value provided, and a service unit-the organizational unit responsible for the capability to be applied. So a shoe repair service is offered by a shoe repair shop. The service is that of repaired shoes. The service unit is the shoe repair shop, including the facilities, materials and shoe repair person.

The service unit will use business processes to perform the work that produces business value. Business processes may be performed manually, they may be executed by a Business Process Management System (BPMS), or they may be embedded in computer applications. Business processes should begin and end within the service unit. Some may be initiated by service requests, and others may be internal processes, either sub-processes or processes that maintain the service capability such as machine repair and payroll.

Too often, services are described as capabilities used by business processes. So, the architecture diagram shows business processes above services and services providing interfaces to applications (essentially embedded business processes). While services are generally invoked by business processes, the model should be that a business process within a service unit is using the services of other service units. The business processes are always a mechanism for applying a capability to produce business value. In a SOA, a business process that uses services is part of the inner workings of a consumer service unit.

Applying SOA to the structure of business processes improves the manageability of the business processes and reduces the coupling between organizational units. A service unit can improve its business processes without engaging other organizations, unless of course there is a need to change the specification for exchange of service requests and responses. A well-defined interface also enables the same capability to be used in other contexts-a major benefit of SOA.