WP-JRA-2.1: Business Process Management
Business Process Management
(BPM) has recently emerged as both a management principle and a
suite of software technologies focusing on management of the lifecycle
of a business process
ranging from business goals reflected in the definition of business
processes, to the deployment, execution, measurement, analysis, change,
and redeployment of these business processes. A prime constituent of
BPM entails a business process that
is defined as a process used to achieve a well-defined business outcome
and is completed according to a set of procedures. A business process
may span organizations and may typically involve both people and
systems.
A workflow
is a technology for realizing of inter- and intra-enterprise (business)
process. Workflow constructs make it possible to implement business
process aspects like logical decision points, sequential as wells as
parallel work routs, as well as managing of exceptional situations.
Business processes are governed and
constrained by business rules that
define the business terms and facts (structural assertions) as well as
the constraints underlying the business behavior (action assertions).
Business rules represent core business
policies. Business policies capture the nature of an
enterprise’s business model and define the conditions that must be met
in order to move to the next stage of the process.
A value
chain is the largest possible business process in an
organization. The value chain is decomposed into a set of core business
processes and support processes necessary to produce a service, product
or product line. These core business processes are subdivided into activities. The near real-time
monitoring of business activities, the measurement of Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs), their presentation in dashboards, and the
automatic and proactive notification in case of deviations constitutes
the notion of Business Activity
Monitoring (BAM).
In environments involving business
collaborations, business processes are increasingly complex and
integrated both within internal corporate business functions and across
the external supply chain. In such environments there is a clear need
for advanced business applications to coordinate multiple services into
a multi-step business
transaction. This requires that several web
service operations or processes attain transactional
properties reflecting business semantics, which are to be treated as a
single logical (atomic) unit of work that can be performed as part of a
business transaction.
Business processes and business
transactions communicate by employing business protocols. A business protocol
specifies the possible message exchange sequences (conversations) that
are supported by the service to achieve a business goal. Business
protocols are not executable, but protocols can be specified using BPEL
(or any of the many other formalisms developed for this purpose)
defining in a reusable manner the way to process the workflow specific
data.
Business Process Management
Software Suites (BPMS) provide an integrated set of tools to
model, design, simulate and deploy business processes and process- or
transaction based applications, delivering greater degrees of process
management delivery, include the following building blocks:
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Business Process
Modeling: Process models are needed to help business managers
and analysts understand actual processes and enable them, by
visualization and simulation, to propose improvements. In particular,
business process modeling relates to design methodologies (Engineering and Design).
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Business Process
Integration (BPI): Connecting the process elements so that
they can seamlessly exchange information to achieve business goals. For
applications this means using APIs and messaging. For people this means
creating a workspace on the desktop or fulfilling their part of the
process. Business process integration relates to service and process
segments synthesized from distributed geographic locations as described
in Service
Composition.
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Business Process
Execution: Once the design and modeling exercise is
accomplished, the process is deployed and executed within a BPM
execution engine. The BPM execution engine executes process instances
by delegating work to humans and automated applications as specified in
the process model. The execution environment employs composition
languages such as BPEL and relies on an appropriate Service Infrastructure.
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Business Process Analysis, Monitoring and Auditing: This
involves providing graphical administrative tools that illustrate
processes that are in progress, processes that are completed, and
integrate business metrics and key performance indicators with process
descriptions. Audit trails and process history/reporting information is
automatically maintained and available for further use. Business
process activities are logged and monitored as described in Adaptation and Monitoring.
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Business Process
Measurement: Managing processes first requires aggregating
process data in business-oriented metrics such as key performance
indicators and balanced scorecards. If the process is “out of bounds”
or SLAs are not being met, the next step is to recalibrate it by
reconfiguring resources or modifying business rules – dynamically and
“on the fly.” Business process activities are measured according to KPI
as described in Adaptation and
Monitoring and Quality Definition,
Negotiation and Assurance.
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Business Process
Optimization: Optimization means process improvement, which
should be an ongoing activity. This item involves optimizing process
flows of all sizes, crossing any application, company boundary and
connects process design and process maintenance.
The next-generation of service-enabled
BPM will serve as a means of developing mission-critical applications
based on strategic technology capable of creating and executing
cross-enterprise collaborative business processes and business-aware
transactions, so that organizations can deploy, monitor, and
continuously update cross-enterprise functions within a mixed
environment of people, content, and systems. Such collaborative,
complex end-to-end service interactions give raise to the concept of Agile Service Networks
(ASNs).