"Getting a real capacity for processes is very important. You can't really do it without BPM," he said.

Another stumbling block is data, Brown said. When getting systems that haven't talked together to work together in a process, data is the problem.

In an SOA framework, reliance on a mainframe isn't something that needs to be changed.

"At Merrill Lynch many business processes run on the mainframe," he said. Benefits are that the costs are known and controlled and the mainframe is stable and reliable, according to Brown.