ABSTRACT
Information technology can fulfill its role as a strategic differentiator only if it can provide enterprises with a mechanism to provide sustainable competitive advantage-the ability to change business processes in sync with changes in the business environment and that too at optimum costs. This is achievable on the foundation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that exposes the fundamental business capabilities as flexible, reusable services; SOA along with the constituting services is the foundation of a modern Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). The services support a layer of agile and flexible business processes that can be easily changed to provide new products and services to keep ahead of the competition. The most important value of SOA is that it provides an opportunity for IT and the business to communicate and interact with each other at a highly efficient and equally understood level. That common, equally understood language is the language of business process or enterprise processes in BPMN.
Enterprise systems (ES) enable an organization to truly function as an integrated enterprise, integration across all functions or segments of the traditional value chain-sales order, production, inventory, purchasing, finance and accounting, personnel and administration, and so on. They do this by modeling primarily the business processes as the basic business entities of the enterprise rather than by modeling data handled by the enterprise (as done by the traditional IT systems). However, every ES might not be completely successful in doing this. In a break with the legacy enterprise-wide solutions, modern ES treat business processes as more fundamental than data items.
