 | Level: Intermediate Christina Lau (clau@ca.ibm.com), Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Canada
24 Apr 2007 Discover how business process management (BPM) fits into the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) life cycle. This series, using architectural scenarios, explains how BPM, when combined with SOA, provides greater flexibility for your business processes and IT infrastructure. Elements of SOA enable BPM so that users can be more responsive to changing market conditions, opportunities, customers, competitive actions, and 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. The series also describes specific technologies, products, best practices, and patterns you can use to develop your BPM solution from any starting point. In this first article, explore a high-level view of five entry points that enable you to enter into BMP with SOA.
Introduction
BPM enabled by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a flexible architectural style to help you create efficient process change and rapid process deployment. BPM is a discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise to accelerate process improvement. 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.
IBM offers several entry points for customers to begin BPM with SOA. As shown in Figure 1, the entry points are:
- Modeling and simulation
- Business activity monitoring (BAM)
- Process execution and optimization
- Rules and prebuilt frameworks
- Content and collaboration
Figure 1. Five core BPM software components
Depending on the business challenges, customers can begin their BPM projects in one or more of these ways. IBM provides software that covers this entire spectrum, compared with niche competitors. This article discusses each of the entry points and the corresponding software and methods that you can adopt.
Modeling and simulation
You want to integrate your business processes, but where to begin? Many business processes are undocumented. How can you calculate the cost of integrating and automating these processes? How can you visualize existing bottlenecks that are preventing the performance of these processes when there are limited views, and limited understanding, of the processes?
| | Go to Resources for information on all products mentioned in this article. |
|
If you're facing this scenario, IBM® WebSphere® Business Modeler (Modeler) can get you started. Begin by using Modeler to document existing processes and create the "as-is" state. Once the process is visualized, you can refine the process model, run simulations to look for improvements, and create the "to-be" state. Using WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Server, you can publish the process models where cross-division teams can collaborate and review the to-be process model using a Web browser.
Business activity monitoring
Managers need real-time information about the status and results of various operations, processes, and transactions so they can make good business decisions. They need real-time access to critical business performance indicators so they can improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations, and to quickly recognize problem areas and reposition organizations to take full advantage of emerging opportunities.
If you are faced with this kind of scenario, a BAM system implemented with WebSphere Business Monitor (Monitor) can be an excellent starting point. BAM operations are typically triggered directly by events and draw information from multiple applications and systems. For example, by generating and monitoring business events from a business process, such as an account opening, Monitor can detect delays and alert managers to investigate and correct potential problems.
Process execution and optimization
If you're an integration developer, you want to build business processes using existing services and new services. You need to find existing services you can use as building blocks to assemble the new components. You also need a unified way to integrate people and information, and to access different back-end systems, such as SAP and PeopleSoft.
For developers facing this scenario, WebSphere Integration Developer (Integration Developer) is a good tool to use as the starting point to assemble such a complex solution. You can connect to the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository to retrieve an existing service, use the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) editor to create business processes that invoke different services, and add human actions to activities. The completed module can be unit tested and then deployed to WebSphere Process Server for execution.
Rules and prebuilt frameworks
If you want more agility, you need to be able to customize product and service offerings without additional IT cost. Businesses also need to respond to competitive threats or regulatory requirements in a proactive, timely manner. How can application developers externalize specific logic from the business processes so that they can be changed dynamically and easily?
For this scenario, start with a rule-based architecture designed and implemented using WebSphere Integration Developer. With Integration Developer, the developer can extract the frequently changed decision logic into RuleSet and Decision Table using the built-in business rules framework. Using the Business Rule Manager, you can change the deployed rules based on business needs. If your business requires a more sophisticated rules engine, you can use a business partner product, such as ILOG JRules, to design the business rules and then integrate them into the business process.
If you want to start with prebuilt frameworks, WebSphere Business Services Fabric provides a platform for the rapid assembly, delivery, and governance of industry-focused composite business services. It provides industry common services and models that can speed the delivery and assembly of business services.
Content and collaboration
Most companies want to manage content (documents, files, forms, and images) as it flows through a business process. The content can be both electronic and physical, and can be used as input for a decision or produced as the output. How the content item is initiated, routed, stored, and retrieved in the context of the business process is critical for compliance purposes. For example, a form can have an electronic signature on it and be kept as a record of the transaction.
For developers facing this scenario, content-centric BPM using FileNet is a good starting point. Many analysts agree that the FileNet acquisition strengthens the IBM BPM approach. FileNet has an exceptionally strong content-centric BPM that complements IBM's existing process and transaction-centric BPM in WebSphere software products. FileNet strengths are content routing and content management. Tightly integrated e-Form capabilities provide customers with more integrated document-driven processes, where users are called on to respond to content as part of the business process.
Summary
This article provides a high-level view of BPM in the context of the SOA life cycle, as shown in Figure 2. BPM with SOA allows you to flexibly treat elements of business processes, and the underlying IT infrastructure, as standardized components that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities. Services are the building blocks for the business processes. By understanding the common business problems through architectural scenarios, such as those in this article, customers can get started in a more prescriptive way with BPM.
Figure 2. SOA capabilities
Future articles in this series drill down into each of the scenarios and describe the specific technologies, products, best practices, and patterns you can use to develop your BPM solution from any of these starting points. This series also discusses the integration between the products and shows how they can be used together to build your complete BPM solution.
Resources Learn
Get products and technologies
-
Get started now! Download IBM product evaluation versions and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere.
Discuss
About the author | 
| | Christina Lau is a senior technical staff member at IBM. Christina leads the BPM Architecture, Strategy and Advanced Technology Team, focusing on next-generation BPM technologies. |
Rate this page
| |
