I attended a Wipro seminar on business process management and SOA. During the session one of the speakers (Steve Towers) made an interesting presentation on process simplification by focussing on moment of truths, break points and business rules. His message was to focus on customer touch points and really think about this as an opportunity to delight your customers. To do this, the enterprise must be agile enough to make changes to the workflows in a dynamic fashion. An example he provided was that of Zara, where they respond to market changes in a matter of weeks as apposed to the competition that took months.
The second session focussed on SOA. In particular, how do justify investing in this. A key point that the speaker (Jason Bloomberg from Zapthink) brought out was the benefits of modularity and loose coupling. SOA allows business to encapsulate their functions and allow businesses to orchestrate their own business process by combining components from within and outside the enterprise. Another trend is in allowing users to create their own portals by mixing and matching components to create custom applications.
The two concepts described above are intricately connected. However, as we witnessed in the seminar, they exist as two separate camps. The way to get them to think and align their objectives is by using the abstraction called architecture.