Business Process Management (BPM)

The heart of BPM solutions deals with both process improvement and operational excellence. It plays a role in the various phases of project lifecycles (such as requirements gathering, modeling, analysis, design, im- provement, development, and deploy- ment), as well as in the post-project phases of processes (such as control, monitoring, maintenance, and management of business processes). A true BPM platform han- dles not only the components of business engineering such as modeling and analysis, but also the components of software engi- neering such as integration, connectivity to existing IT infrastructure through adapters, and enterprise-class middleware manage- ment. Human-centric workfows that seam- lessly integrate with system-centric processes must support the role played by people in business processes.

In order to support both process improve- ment and operational management, it is essential that the various capabilities of BPM form a set of cohesive tools for mod- eling, analysis, workfow design, user-inter- face design, governance, and metadata. A BPM platform that has a strong integration infrastructure moves processes from design to automation with minimum code and manages their run-time infrastructure. This facilitates rapid implementation of process improvement projects.

Process Enablement: The process-model- ing environment helps business analysts and process experts document, model, and improve business processes. A process re- pository allows process designers to quickly reuse and modify existing processes to cre- ate new processes. The development envi- ronment allows architects to link process steps to technical services, to connect them to existing third-party applications, or to create new services.

Process Automation: Technical architects and developers can use the integrated de- velopment environment to compose exist- ing services or build new services to imple- ment the improved process. The process server and integration server manage the run-time environment of processes. This provides users the capability to run what is modeled (‘What You Model Is What You Run’).

Process Monitoring: Key performance in- dicators (KPIs) refect business and opera- tional metrics. Users can defne them either in the modeling environment or in the Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) envi- ronment. The BAM capabilities allow users to monitor these KPIs in real-time. Complete drill-down of KPI trees, linkage with underlying business processes, trend analy- sis, comparative analysis, alerts, and run- time confguration are available. BAM also includes predictive analysis and patented fngerprinting to enable proactive, case- based exception management.

Governance: Design-time governance supports process improvement projects by promoting reuse, implementing controls over creation of reusable processes or ser- vices, and managing IT assets. Run-time governance ensures that process applica- tions follow security and architecture stan- dards. It also monitors SLAs and identifes remedial action in case of service degrada- tion. Change-time governance allows rapid but controlled changes to business process- es or their underlying services through composition, confguration, and customiza- tion.

Integration Infrastructure: Service-orient- ed architecture and integration infrastruc- ture implement the four main process ca- pabilities, contributing to rapid development. This infrastructure includes middleware ser- vices and adapters that connect to third- party applications.

BPM offers a very powerful set of capabilities that affect nearly all aspects of the business. The adoption of BPM is easy because it offers many alternative points of entry. It couples ease of implementation with low cost and low risk. BPM has the best risk-re- ward profle compared to traditional approaches to projects, process improvements, and business management.

Process Definition

General purpose workflow engines appeared on the market as platforms for building any process-based application. Companies in many different industries began applying these to many different problems with varying degrees of success. One major obstacle in applying these to more complex problems is accounting for all of the possible variations which need to be allowed for the process to be successful. Adding all of the conditions and branching into the process definition made them difficult to develop, understand or maintain.

Confirm scope and define boundaries: To ensure that the scope for the process improvement initiative is clearly defined and agreed for what is in scope and what is out of scope.

Document the process context: To document the ‘As-Is’ state of the current process to establish a baseline

Document findings: To use the current process models to guide the identification of issues and opportunities within the ‘As-Is’ process models.

Recommend analysis of the processes: To consolidate the findings from the Definition phase and to present the Process Analysis Report for endorsement and approval to proceed to the next stage.

Process Design

Developing applications on a BPM platform is a new development paradigm, and in some aspects it requires a new mindset to ensure a successful outcome.  A key element is re-thinking the approach to initial process design. Experienced process designers, just as experts in any development methodology, instinctively understand how to approach new processes.  They have many “rules of thumb” and other empirical guidelines learned from experience which help them avoid problems.  If these rules of good process design could be codified and widely disseminated, more organizations could more quickly reap the benefits of process automation.