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IBM Business Process Management Journal

Issue 5.1: February 13, 2013

IBM Business Process Management Journal

A word from the editor:

Rubik's Cubes and life on the edge! What do these have to do with BPM and SOA? Regular columnists Scott Simmons and Claus Jensen will answer these questions and more in this edition of the IBM BPM Journal. You'll also find out how to determine the best strategy for managing reference data in a BRMS, how to use dynamic domains for easy, accurate rule authoring in IBM ODM, how to enable BPM widgets to run in a WebSphere Portal environment, how to integrate WebSphere eXtreme Scale and IBM BPM for improved performance and high availability, and lots more.

We hope you find what you're looking for in this issue of the BPM Journal. If you have any questions or suggestions for future topics, please contact the editor, Christine (Chris) Rothemich. We'd love to hear from you!

Top story

Strategies for managing reference data in a business rules application using IBM Operational Decision Manager

by Jerome Boyer and Zhuo (Joe) Fu
This article covers common strategies for reference data management in rule authoring and rule execution when using IBM Operational Decision Manager. It describes the advantages and disadvantages to each approach to help you determine the best approach to use for your business rule application.

BPM Voices

  • Insight at the edge
    by Claus Jensen

    "In the world of mobile, cloud and APIs, how do you assert control at the edge of the enterprise, the boundary between the unpredictable external environment and the internal managed systems? And, perhaps even more importantly, how do you gain insight into customer behavior and preferences so that you can advance the customer relationship with every action you take?..."

    Read the column

In this issue

Integrating IBM Business Process Manager with WebSphere eXtreme Scale for high availability and security

by Andrew Howes and Phillip Norton
WebSphere eXtreme Scale enables the caching of large amounts of data to help improve performance when using services. This article describes how to integrate eXtreme Scale into IBM BPM mediation flows, so that eXtreme Scale can benefit from the high availability and security infrastructure provided by WebSphere Application Server which underpins BPM, and IBM BPM can improve performance.

Configuring IBM Business Process Management Human Task Management widgets for use in WebSphere Portal

by Andreas Schuetz and Elke Painke
The Human Task Management widgets in IBM Business Process Manager V7.5 are designed to run in a Business Space environment, but they can also be run in IBM WebSphere Portal V7. This article describes how to install, configure, and customize these widgets in a Portal environment. This enables you to build a unified environment of portlets and widgets within a single web portal page, so that you can run BPM processes and tasks in your portal pages.

Using dynamic domains for flexible rule authoring in WebSphere Operational Decision Management

by Rajesh Rao and Catherine Rivi
Ensuring rule accuracy is an important part of rule development in WebSphere Operational Decision Management V7.5. This article demonstrates how a dynamic domain populated from a Microsoft Excel file can be used to reduce inaccuracies when authoring rules. Using domains also eliminates dependencies on IT support for code changes because business users can extend the set of values in the domain by simple edits to the spreadsheet in the Decision Center. Further, because adding a domain value does not result in changes to service contracts, redeployment of rule services is not necessary

How to secure a hosted transparent decision service in IBM Operational Decision Management

by Tamer Nassar, Murali Vridhachalam, and Zhi Yong Mao
This article explores one of the techniques you can use to secure a hosted transparent decision service in IBM Operational Decision Manager. Authentication and authorization are often required in a production environment. In this article, you'll learn how to configure a hosted transparent decision service to connect to LDAP for authentication, as well as define additional code to validate whether the calling user ID is authorized to invoke the rule project.

Implementing a negotiation process in IBM Business Process Manager using web services

by Jawahar Husain and Gowdhaman Jayaseelan
This article describes using the undercover agent (UCA), handlers and web services in IBM Business Process Manager to implement a negotiation process with an external system. The BPM process will expose a web service that will be invoked by another system. The negotiation occurs until an approval or rejection occurs.

BPM TV

Check out these educational and entertaining videos by IBM Software Services for WebSphere integration architect Brian Petrini.

  • BPM and SOA: Better together

    Brian talks about the difference between BPM and SOA, and why they're best combined for a robust integration solution. He also talks about the difference between a business process and a service, and what scenarios lend themselves to using IBM BPM Advanced vs. IBM BPM Standard.

  • The BPM Compendium: Everything you ever wanted to know about BPM

    Brian describes the IBM BPM Compendium of Public Knowledge, a useful resource for anyone designing and building solutions using IBM Business Process Manager V7.5, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, and related products. It contains categorized links to publicly available content available for BPM.

Other recently published content of interest

Business Process Management with IBM Business Process Manager

BPM solutions enable an enterprise to choreograph processes and the process steps across disparate applications, people, and systems. In addition to reduced cost through continued process improvement and automation, BPM provides the foundation for converged and agile business and IT responsiveness. The benefits of implementing BPM solutions using IBM Business Process Manager are presented in this IBM Redbooks Solution Guide.

IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management V8.0 Performance Tuning Guide

WebSphere Operational Decision Management (WODM) V8.0. is a family of products used by IT and Business users to create and manage business decision logic used throughout their organization. This book offers advice on all aspects of performance, including hardware, architecture, authoring, quality of service, monitoring and tuning. The advice is based upon preferred practices and experience gained from real customer situations.

Building an Application with Decisions, Processes, and Insight: An IBM Redbooks Solution Guide

In today's fast-paced business climate, companies must make quick decisions to win new business, maintain existing relationships, and build on the trust and goodwill earned over time. However, because of the complexity of existing business logic, adjusting or improving applications takes careful planning and time to implement any needed changes effectively. An integrated sense-and-respond solution provides awareness through events, direction through decisions, actions through processes, and insight through analysis. As described in this IBM Redbooks Solution Guide, this simplified solution demonstrates how you can structure advanced applications around business process management concepts and methodologies to provide decision-making capabilities that are based on real-time data analysis.

Creating a BPM Center of Excellence (COE)

This IBM Redpaper seeks to eliminate the uncertainty organizations face in this next generation of BPM--maturing beyond the success of BPM projects. The goals and concepts of dozens of mature BPM organizations have been consolidated and categorized to provide you with clear mandates, with hope that this clarity will provide purpose, and that this purpose will drive excellence.

Business process optimization series

This series explores commonly held concepts behind business performance and agility, and illustrates at a practical level how to extend these into new and innovative ways of measuring, achieving and sustaining business performance through business agility. The business process optimization (BPO) method described provides a means of combining various technological innovations in the context of a business-centric view that affords increased agility to achieve business outcomes.