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
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 This can result in outdated systems and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.
