Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the foundation of many solution
middleware and applications in the IT industry. One such solution is
business process management (BPM). BPM is the next level of integration in
the business enterprise. It is about combining business processes, IT, and
human expertise to form a unified business unit that can be modeled,
implemented, monitored, analyzed, and optimized.
BPM combines software capabilities and business expertise to enable users
to become more responsive to changing market conditions -- opportunities,
customers, and competitive actions -- to facilitate business change.
Business agility is achieved through standardizing, automating, and
integrating key business processes and managing the performance of these
processes to optimize business functions and enterprise activity.
Depending on business challenges, you can begin your BPM projects with one
or more of the six core components that make up a BPM solution:
Building BPM user interfaces: Design and implement business
dashboards
Modeling and simulation: Design and simulate business processes
Business activity monitoring (BAM): Track performance, processes,
and operational activity using key performance indicators
Process execution and optimization: Choreograph processes across
application, systems, and people
Rules and prebuilt frameworks: Manage process rules and accelerate
design and implementation time
Content and collaboration: Manage group tasks, documents and forms
as part of processes
This series of articles explores each of these components using scenarios
that describe particular business problems and the specific software
products, technologies, and implementation methods used to develop the
corresponding BPM solutions.
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