Dr. Bruce Silver defines Business Process Management as a better way to think about the business, seeing across functional and organizational lines. The existing structure of most businesses is a vertical stovepipe arrangement, which goes against this kind of thinking. Great benefits can be achieved from the technology through process automation when BPM is employed, particularly with the human tasks involved. This allows for integration and agility within the enterprise. Another benefit is the ability to monitor the process metrics. BPMS technology is based on executable process models.
One of the underpinnings of BPM is externalized process logic. The problem has been that process logic usually is embedded in business systems within separate stovepipes. The solution is to decompose the business systems into reusable modules or services and expose the logic to a separate solution layer external to other systems. The model is composed as a graphical tool to make it accessible to users.
Typically, the business side has meetings, decides on a direction and the requirements, then gives the results to IT to build a workable solution. IT builds it, hoping it works as intended. Usually, it doesn’t. BPMS is a better way to provide continuous process improvement because it allows the business side to create the modeling tools and execution engines for the specific business tasks needed. Business and IT continuously work together, rather than working under the traditional Business/IT divide. Business and IT both use the same tools. The analytical process model goes right into the executable process model, then the data is processed and goes back into analytics for review and refinement.
There are two architectures for BPMS. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) invokes activities as web service operations and describes automated activities and integration well. But BPEL doesn’t work well with human tasks, as it can only invoke a task. IBM, Oracle, BEA, Microsoft, and Intalio use it. BPEL is useful, according to Silver, but incomplete.
The other architecture is XPDL, supported by many more companies. It puts work items in queues and works better for human activities than for automated activities. IBM, FileNet, Tibco, Savvion, Fuego, Fujitsu, and Documentum use this approach. The emerging solution involves fixing and adding to both BPEL and XPDL.
Improved BPMS functionality involves agile integration infrastructure, business rules, and content management and collaboration.
BPM analytics (BPMN) is a diagramming standard that is rich enough to model processes and bridge the gap between EA and BPMS. It is usable for flowcharts, events, scopes, and more. Metamodel and schema are coming. Silver expects widespread buy-in for BPMN.
Another new feature in BPMS is simulation, which allows modeling activity. It accepts feedback of actual performance data to refine parameters.
Agile integration infrastructure is accomplished with integration adaptors, which integrate components and expose them to BPMS as a service and executes a response when invoked by the process. It turns the existing monolithic systems into a bag of services that can be used by the processes.
Analysts now include ECM (Enterprise Content Management) as part of BPMS.
However, most real BPMS is not content-aware. It treats data repositories like any external business system. Content awareness means having content methods in activity palettes and content events that trigger process actions such an update.
Selecting the right BPMS means matching your process type. Do you do mostly straight-through processing or human interaction? Do you have thousands of instances per hour or only tens or hundreds? Is it within the firewall or B2B? You also need to select your BPMS by matching it to your process designer skills and experience. According to Silver, each BPMS solution assumes a particular skill set for the process designers.
Also, focus on the special features such as performance management, business rules, human workflow, content awareness, and vertical solution templates.
Each BPMS emphasizes different selected features. Remember the usual IT concerns for architecture, compatibility, platform, standards, tools, vendor experience, and financial strength. Silver recommended the “Managers Guide to BPM Software Report Series” for an in-depth walk-through of all the leading BPM products.
