Early Experiences on Adopting BPM and SOA: An Empirical Study

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) are promising concepts that have recently received much attention by industry and academia. Despite the current hype around these concepts, industrial experiences are still limited. Not many studies have been made to show difficulties and pitfalls in adopting them and corresponding technologies within an organization. This paper presents results from an empirical study inside the IT organization of Danske Bank, one of the largest financial groups in northern Europa, which has been a pioneer in adopting a SOA, BPM and recently has updated its complete development process to focus on MDSD. The study shows the business value of automating a tranditional business process using SOA and BPM and following a model driven development process, but it also reveals several challenges during the complete lifecycle of modeling and implementing the business process, i.e. analysing existing work practice and defining the process design, translating the design to code, testing and deploying it, execution, and at last difficulties with change management when requirements changes. Further it describes back offices workers experiences of being a part of an automated process.