As the IT industry undergoes a major shift towards use of service oriented architecture (SOA), traditional enterprise applications—which today are designed to support departmental functions such as accounting or sales—need to evolve to drive end-to-end business processes across silos. In virtually every industry today, a single order or transaction may go through several applications and systems, even third-party systems as it progresses from initial inquiry to delivery and payment.
Without the ability to integrate and coordinate all the systems involved in complex multi-step processes, businesses cannot meet customer expectations for selection, speed, and reliability. In other words, applications that do not take a process-based approach limit a company’s potential because they do not operate in the same manner as their business.
