Christina Lau is a Distinguished Engineer and leads the BPM Architecture and Advanced Technology Team, focusing on future BPM technologies and consumability improvements in the IBM BPM offerings. This blog shares perspectives on how business process management can help organizations become more responsive, provide insights from our customers BPM journey, and keep you up to date on the happenings around our BPM portfolio.

BAM - easy on ramp to BPM

Last year, we talked about the various entry points a customer can take to begin their BPM projects: Modeling & Simulation, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Process Execution and Optimization, Rules and Pre-built Frameworks, Content and Collaboration.

At Impact, a number of our customers such as USAA (Session 2344) and NYS (Session 2402) shared with us their experiences on using BAM as their on ramp to BPM. They are really fascinating stories on how BAM helped them understand and manage their workload better, provided more objective evaluation of their employees performance, gave reliable, timely reports to stakeholders, and allowed their business to plan future process improvement projects based on hard data.

So if you are wondering how you can do a little BAM? Here are 5 easy steps to follow:

1. Instrument your application to emit Common Base Events and test the events emission. Determine what operations and attributes from your application you want to monitor.
2. Create a Monitor Model using the WebSphere Business Monitor Development Toolkit. Add metrics, key performance indicators, and conditions that might trigger business actions. Start with simple and small number of key metrics (e.g. < 10) and increase complexity over time because new BAM users might not know what they need.
3. Design your Monitor Dashboards. The dashboards is a good way to get early stakeholders feedback and generate excitement that can help ensure your organization adoption and buy in. Demonstrate them early.
4. Integration and Testing. Before the production roll out of your new BAM solution - test, test and more test. You are almost there, but take your time on this final step. Here are some items to consider: Have you tuned your CEI server, your messaging engines and queues? Did you include the network configurations (e.g. proxies, firewalls) in your integration testing? What is your recovery strategy in the case of system failures - do you care about the loss of events? Does your system need to support load fluctuations on a periodic basis etc.
5. Launch your project. Celebrate your success. Use some of the insights you derived from your BAM data and start planning your next BPM project.

It really is quite simple!


May 15 2008, 09:15:59 PM EDT Permalink

It is all about Choices

It seems like the question on overlaps in our portfolio keep coming up. But is some amount of overlap really such a bad thing? I mean, each technology that we have is really coming from a different angle, optimized for certain business scenarios and applications. For example, take WebSphere Process Server and FileNet P8, they are optimized to handle different kinds of business processes. Depending on your scenarios, you might want to choose WPS or you might want to choose FileNet. Maybe you even need to use both.

If you take a step back, choosing what technology to use perhaps is not so different from choosing your favorite toy - e.g. your car, your house, what entertainment system to buy or even your running shoes. I buy a new tennis racquet every couple years. I am always looking for the next new technology that can give me that extra competitive edge best suited to my ability at the time. Having lots of choices is actually a very good thing. The real question is how do you choose based on your requirements (e.g. more control, more power, bigger sweet spot)? And can you draw on others experience if you are uncertain how to choose (e.g. your friends, your heros or even your competitors)?

I plan to use the next few blogs to discuss different scenarios that will motivate using different starting points for BPM. I will also share some of our engagement experiences on how different companies have adopted BPM and making those right choices for their business needs.


May 12 2008, 07:16:58 PM EDT Permalink

Seamless integration of Human Tasks and Business Processes

Can you imagine that we now have a new SOA Configuration Solution that can create a working Process Portal in under two hours in 5 simple steps:

1. Plug hard drive into a laptop or a workstation. The SOA Deployer image contains everything needed to deploy a working Process Portal.
2. Mount the hard drive and start the SOA Deployer image.
3. Access the Web UI using a browser and answer deployment questionnaire. There are 16 questions and between 29 to 68 parameters requiring input, with many of the entry fields containing meaningful default values.
4. Relax while images are deployed.
5. Wait for confirmation that the images are activated as specified.

That is all. This new pattern based deployment has emerged from extensive experience gathered from many of our customer implementations. Give it a try. I am sure you find this a huge consumability improvement.

Categories : [   Configuration  |  SOA  ]

May 10 2008, 11:08:15 AM EDT Permalink

BPM at Impact 2008

At Impact 2008, IBM made a number of cool announcements around BPM. I also attended a number of sessions where customers spoke about their very interesting journeys towards BPM - from valuable lessons learned with unexpected (pleasant) surprises, to ROI quick wins and new insights on how to roll out their next BPM project. Craig Hayman also commented on how BPM is a bit like the early days of the application server where everyone is asking what BPM means.

Bruce Silver, a well-known analyst on BPM started blogging about our BPM story and how we need to tell our story better. He is absolutely right. We have done a lot in the BPM space in the last few years. There are a lot of BPM capabilities across the IBM Software Group portfolio, and our world-wide development teams have worked really hard to integrate many products to produce a truly integrated and compelling platform. The IBM BPM Suite that was announced at Impact is a testament to the establishment of BPM as an integrated suite in our software group portfolio.

I plan to use this blog to delve into a range of BPM-related subjects. We invite you to speak out on BPM through comments in the blog - from where your organization stands on BPM adoption, to your challenges and experiences. By tapping into the Wisdom of Crowds, we can all learn from each other and explore new ways to align your business with IT that can deliver immediate value to your company.