The SOA approach provides huge benefits in BPM. In older IT architectures, the business processes and applications were not linked together. Business processes were "nice drawings", and applications very complex and resistant to change. If the process needed to change, which was quite often, it took a very long time to adapt all applications. The SOA approach provides huge savings as applications are much better aligned with business processes. This reduces the time required for adoption and makes the IT system more flexible.

With this flexibility, another common problem is solved. Optimizing business processes means changing them. Changes in business processes are directly related to changes to the tasks of those employees that are involved with the processes. The fact, however, remains that people do not like changes.

In the traditional approach to business processes optimization, projects have often failed because people tried to carry out very large modifications of several...