Welcome to the premier edition of the IBM® Business Process Management
Journal, dedicated to providing both business and IT professionals with the
latest news about IBM business process management tools and technologies. Inside
this first edition, you'll find out what's new in several key IBM BPM V6.2
products, learn how to develop a business event processing application with IBM
WebSphere® Business Events, and how to leverage BPM, SOA, and EA (Enterprise
Architecture) to align business and IT. You'll also get the answers to common
WebSphere Business Modeler questions, and hear from BPM experts on business
activity monitoring (BAM), as well as business event processing with WebSphere
Business Monitor, complete with a demo.
Featured articles: Make your enterprise one that can
recognize and respond to situations as they arise, build an end-to-end business
event processing application, customize your user interfaces with business
spaces, and learn how you can keep your business processes in sync over time.
Departments: Find out What's new in the
latest versions of WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Integration Developer,
and WebSphere Business Modeler. And speaking of WebSphere Business Modeler,
this issue's Q&A offers answers to the most frequently asked
questions from WebSphere Business Modeler users.
Guest columnists:Joachim Frank describes
what actually happens when business events are monitored, and Dr. Wil Jamison
explains something called "BAM everywhere" and how it adds a whole new dimension
to productivity.
Find out about the new features, functions, and enhancements in the latest
versions of these BPM products, offering simplicity, flexibility, and new
capabilities to help you get the most out of your business processing
environment.
"At the core of Monitor are observer objects, which are created for entities
you want to monitor. An observer object is called a "monitoring context" because
the information it collects provides the context for monitoring some (real or
abstract) entity. Its data fields, which typically contain business-relevant
measurements, are called "metrics". A monitoring context subscribes to "events"
that report state changes of the monitored entity, and then updates its metrics
based on those events. For example, a limo company that wants to monitor its
fleet of cars might allocate a monitoring context for each trip, with metrics
for trip duration, pick-up and drop-off delays, average driving speed, and so on.
Now that you understand some of the basic concepts and terminology, let's see
how it all works ..."
"Let me clarify that 'BAM everywhere' is not about the presence of business
activity monitoring in every business enterprise around you (although that would
not be a bad proposition at all). Rather, this is about the ability of an
enterprise to access and incorporate business monitoring information into its
mainstream process, which means having the ability to retrieve business
performance data when you need it, where you need it. This is achieved by
providing various media for client-side connectivity to these data by leveraging
cutting-edge technologies, as well as making use of mainstream devices, gadgets,
and tools..."
IBM WebSphere Business Modeler is a powerful tool for creating process models.
With it, you can document and simulate business processes, perform analysis to
improve processes, export business models to IBM run time environments, and much
more. Here are the top ten frequently asked questions about WebSphere Business
Modeler. If you're new to Modeler, you will likely find some answers here that
will help you get started. If you have Modeler experience, test your knowledge
and stay on top of the basics.
The WebSphere BPM product suite provides foundational offerings that makes it
easier for you to get started with BPM. Download the transcript from this recent
chat that covered aspects of using WebSphere Business Space and REST to enable
the portfolio, using the asset repository for BPM, integrating WebSphere
Business Modeler and WebSphere Business Services Fabric, and extending the reach
of Business Activity Monitoring to mobile devices.
