Business process management (BPM) enabled by SOA -- what is it and what does it mean to your company?
How can IBM® products and expertise help with a BPM enabled by SOA solution? This page is a starting point for you to
learn more.
BPM enabled by SOA is a discipline enhanced by a flexible IT architecture that enables businesses to accelerate the creation and reuse of business services to facilitate business innovation. For successful BPM projects, you need both SOA-enabled software and the expertise to deliver and fulfill the promise of BPM. This combination of software and expertise is what IBM calls higher-value BPM.
The figure below shows the common problems faced by many businesses today. With BPM enabled by SOA you can make your critical business processes more efficient and responsive by automating and improving these processes. It enables you to easily capture the performance of every component, so you can quickly identify problem areas and eliminate bottlenecks. BPM enabled by SOA makes key performance indicators available to business owners, enabling you to more easily improve overall performance.
With BPM, companies can maximize their existing people and technology infrastructure by linking existing systems and automating tasks. This is becomes possible as the complexity of integrating multiple processes is significantly reduced through open standards and a well-engineered integration platform.
One the biggest challenges facing companies today is implementing the changes required to adopt new technologies. New applications can take months, even years, to develop, test, and debug. Meantime, the business processes they're intended to support may change, requiring the new applications to be updated. This can result in outdated systems and can negatively impact ROI.
With SOA, though, the time and cost become are greatly reduced. The goal of SOA, like BPM, is to enable companies to respond more quickly to rapidly changing business requirements, such as compliance, mergers and acquisitions, and product and service introductions. SOA is a business-driven IT architectural approach that helps businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs.
SOA has become a crucial foundation for BPM, supporting rapid assembly and orchestration of business process services into larger, end-to-end processes. This is because businesses need to design flexible processes that are based on services that can be modified, without being "hard-wired" into the code structure of the application, without making it future changes difficult.
BPM enabled by SOA creates an environment that changes the traditional process for altering an application to reflect changed business processes. It places the controls for change management in the hands of the business process owner rather than on the shoulders of IT. Through intuitive visual interfaces, effective BPM environments offer business managers ways to alter processes without requiring new code.
With BPM enabled by SOA, organizations can quickly respond to changing solution requirements, changing business goals and the needs of the business. This new agility means that the BPM solution supports the business goals, regardless of how frequently those goals change.
IBM provides both the tools and the expertise you need to implement a BPM solution in your business.
When we talk about BPM expertise, we're talking about more than just implementation services. Expertise means knowledge about the BPM engagement, which can be packaged in different forms, from services to pre-built components based on best practices.
After discussions with hundreds of customers and in-depth reviews with leading industry analysts, IBM has also defined a set of key capabilities necessary for successful BPM, including:
Modeling tools with simulation and analysis
Policies
An integrated development environment
Run-times
A management environment that includes dashboards and monitoring
Repositories, such as service repositories to register and house SOA-based business services
IBM provides a number of software offerings to support BPM, including:
WebSphere Adapters include a range of predefined adapters and a build-your-own toolkit to rapidly and fully integrate your business applications into your SOA.
WebSphere Business Modeler provides tools that help you model, simulate, and analyze complex business processes before they're implemented.
WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Server enhances WebSphere Business Modeler by enabling you to publish business processes and related business information, such as organization diagrams, to a secure Web site.
WebSphere Business Monitor enables you to monitor business processes in real-time, providing a visual display of business process status. It also alerts key users to facilitate continuous improvement of your business processes.
WebSphere Business Services Fabric is an end-to-end SOA platform for modeling, assembly and deployment of business services. It includes WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer.
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, built on WebSphere Application Server, provides Web services connectivity, JMS messaging, and service-oriented integration for standards-based applications.
WebSphere Integration Developer is an eclipse-based IDE that provides development services you can use to build and deploy standards-based business process applications.
WebSphere Partner Gateway is a business-to-business gateway that enables companies to connect large groups of trading partners to their businesses and extend internal integration outside the enterprise.
WebSphere Process Server, built on WebSphere ESB technology, provides a comprehensive run-time, including process choreography that supports long and short running business processes, role-based human tasks and workflow, and provides features for dynamic and adaptive processes based on SOA.
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is a centralized system that works within an SOA to manage, store, and access information about service metadata within an organization and across organizations.
Introducing IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository: This developerWorks series introduces the main concepts and capabilities of IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, explains the role of Service Registry and Repository throughout the SOA life cycle, and provides resources to help you learn more about it.
Sample IT Projects: Business Process Management: This developerWorks article series explores the components of BPM using scenarios that describe particular business problems and the specific software products, technologies, and implementation methods used to develop the corresponding BPM solutions.
developerWorks WebSphere developer zones and resource pages provide the latest technical information for WebSphere developers, including downloads, events, articles, and tutorials:
WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: Each month the journal publishes a host of in-depth articles on WebSphere topics, including SOA, from leading technical experts.
