In the Service of BPM

What is Business Process Management (BPM)? Well, BPM, by definition, enables

the design, analysis, optimization, and automation of business processes. It

does this by separating process logic from the applications that run them;

managing relationships among process participants; integrating internal and

external resources; and monitoring process performance.

For the past few years the computing industry has been working on

standardization of software interfaces and messaging. The objective being that

there needs to be no dependence on software (JAVA/J2EE, Microsoft .NET, etc) or

hardware (HP, IBM, SUN, PCs, etc) technologies for software to communicate with

each other.

Web Services arrived on the scene in the late 90s and had started bridging

this gap. This also ushered the software as a service (SaaS) concept. The

software as a service model composes services dynamically, as needed, by binding

several lower level services-thus overcoming many limitations that constrain

traditional software use, development, and evolution. All of this solved the

application interface problem by standardizing the software interfaces.

Two problems still remained, one is that the messages that flowed between

applications were not standardized and the business logic that formed part of

the Web Services still had to be hand coded. The answer to the later problem is

BPM.

Each BPM software application is defined by a mix of several components.

These components-process design, process monitoring, process operation

(automation and integration)-will weigh heavily in the selection criteria of

BPM software.

Process design



The ability for the business analyst to design processes without needing to

have any programming skills is one of the major benefits of BPM solution. The

offerings include a graphical user interface with drag-and-drop technology to

make process design as intuitive as possible for the business user.

A robust process design module will support all process assets (i.e.

information and people), sub-processes, parallel processes, creation of business

rules, transaction handling, and exception handling among others. This is

otherwise called application/process choreography.

Process monitoring



One major goal of BPM is to realize continuous process improvement. Through

reports and analysis, companies can take steps towards process optimization.

Process operation



The actual operation, or execution, of a process is termed process

operation. This is also called application/process orchestration. Automation and

integration are extremely important pieces of the BPM puzzle.

Automation deals with invocation of services in order to execute process

regardless of modeling language while persisting state and data between service

calls, support for nested processing, where sub-processes invoke other

sub-processes in succession.

Connecting all process participants, whether they be humans or applications,

is one of the most important prerequisites to implementing successful business

processes.