How to better align BPM & SOA - Ideas on improving the transition between process design and deployment

Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are considered as a powerful combination for supporting enterprise's success. While BPM addresses the (goal-driven) design, deployment, and continuous evaluation of business processes, SOA promises a supporting IT paradigm to make process applications and thus enterprises more agile and flexible. Nevertheless, there is still a gap between business and IT, as the services provided by an SOA cannot - until now - support the business processes immediately. In this paper, we focus on the transition between the design and the deployment of business processes and present our ideas on how this transition could be streamlined by a better alignment of BPM and SOA. Based on systems engineering and product line experience, we identify solution principles and discuss related questions.