I have been working with the convergence of business, process, and technology for years. That’s what I do as a consultant. Of course, there are other ways of describing what I (and other consultants) ultimately “do”, but this is certainly one somewhat decent way of describing it.
The interesting thing is that, I finally feel like people in the business world are starting to get it a little. They are finally starting to see the power of driving both business and technology with data-driven decisions based on appropriate measurements and analysis of processes. This leads to the ability to improve process — and in today’s day-and-age, that improvement almost happens with some level of automation and technology.
One of the things that gets me excited is that I believe we will see some real evolution in this arena due to product offerings and marketing from Oracle. Oracle has been a proponent of BPEL standards for years and currently offer it inside Oracle SOA Suite nicely packaged. But, the next big thing that will be changing the way that business, process, and technology converge (as well as the way they are analyzed, measured, improved, and implemented) will be Oracle new BPA Suite. Just as we saw web programming languages/methodologies separate code from design (so that coders and designers could be focused and productive), we will begin to see enterprise developers and business process architects separated as well so that control flow and logic are modeled — and we’re talking about real, visual modeling that actually generates BPEL XML and consumes web services — before a developer ever logs into his/her machine. Some vendors have had offerings in this space in the past, but none were as large as Oracle, none were as focused on open standards, and none have released something innovative in 2007 that takes advantage of latest technologies and avoiding mistakes of the earlier players.
(note to self: not yet proof-read)