The Process Way: Business Process Management & SOA

I wanted to lay down the components of a typical BPM system and how they all work together to provide the concept of process management to the organization.

Business Process Management is both a business and a technology concept depending upon the perspective and roles we perform in an organization.

In this post, I want to target the operational and technical aspects of what constitutes within the realm of BPM.

Operationally speaking Business Process Management is all about achieving efficiency and efficacy for the organization. (Best Practice Note : All process related activities from operational level should be aligned to the value increase for the end customer for maximum results). In Operational terms typically BPM will start with :

1. Business Process Discovery and Analysis : This phase would be all about identifying and envisioning the right process to focus for BPM. Organizations should consider performing Business Process Transformation exercises through series of improvement cycles (use of Lean,Six Sigma to be considered) to achieve the target process map. Having said that its always essential to realize that the aim of BPM is to allow flexibility in incorporating process changes  and organizations should avoid the “Paralysis by analysis” pitfall. Common activities to consider in BPA stage for readers understanding can be :
   • Business Process Discovery workshops
   • Business Process Modelling and setting up Key Process Indicators
   • Business Process Analysis using static analysis (gap analysis metrics, process traceability analysis etc.) and dynamic analysis (simulation using discrete events etc.)
   • Business Process Communication/Publishing : Publish the target process maps for the stakeholders
2. Business Process Orchestration
   • Create the orchestration framework
   • Plan and bring in systems to be integrated and human interfaces to be developed
   • Execute the process to deliver the results (Lot of technical development work involved in background)
   • Develop and deploy business rules to work with the process (separate topic for discussion which I would cover in other posts )
3. Business Process Monitoring
   • Define and monitor the process in real time based on defined KPIs
   • Analyze the key business trends and identify bottlenecks for further improvements
   • Incorporate the findings back into process improvement exercise

So we see that BPM is more of an iterative process to look for constant improvement in how to perform our business to achieve customer satisfaction.

At the technical level BPM is really an implementation and integration story of multiple underlying technologies. Infact its better to look at BPM into multiple components of technologies :

1.  Presentation Layer: Different presentation channels and methods (portals, handhelds etc.)
2. Process Execution Engine : Process Engine for orchestration.
3. Integration Technologies: Technologies like ESB/EAI to provide the integration with multiple systems. SOA based technology layer will be usually created at this layer to bridge between underlying systems and the process engine.
4. Business Rules Engines : technology to abstract business rules from current applications and to be managed centrally for added flexibility to the business users. Many solutions like Blaze advisor, pega systems, ilog provide robust capability in this space.
5. Business Activity Monitoring :  Provide real-time operational visibility of processes to the business users using dashboards and Ability to define process KPIs and measure the performance against these KPIs. BAM is more related to doing BI on process data for real time decision making. This is where Business Process Management in some ways meet Business Performance Management. Tradional BI players like Ascential, data stage are active in this area and so are the major BPM players like IBM, BEA, Sun, Tibco etc.

BPM Reference Architecture

Traditionally BPM systems have come from two main legacies, either they were integration companies(linking multiple systems together) like tibco, seebeyond etc. or work flow based (human task management & documentation) like filenet, documentum etc.

So currently the BPM systems available tend to be strong in either and not both, hence the spur of takeovers for consolidations in this market (IBM takes over filenet, Tibco/staffware, BEA/Fuego etc. ). We should be looking out for more mature integrated offering from all soon enough (hopefully).

We also refer to some of these BPM vendors providing what we can call as “Pure Play BPM” as they have provision to take care of end to end BPM. for e.g. vendors like Lombardi, Appian, Pega, IBM, Ultimus etc. to name a few.

One thing to note is that BPM is much more than just integration and workflow though most can argue about their similarities. BPM is about achieving a framework allowing constant process improvement using a closed loop of business and technical colloboration and make process management more cross-functional than traditional silo based process automation.

I will go into details of each aspect of BPM and its components in greater details but this post is trying to put some perspective to what to expect when we say BPM and not get confused with the confusing noise in the market regarding the subject.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Business Process Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.