Business Process Management Suites (BPMS)

Software Engineering and Business JSF, EJB, ..., Java EE, .Net, ... – all these are component-

oriented technologies used to create software systems This is a very low abstraction level for managers that are

responsible for organizing company’s work What is important for a business? To effectively

organize business processes that make profit (through products or services created)

Business processes must be modeled, analyzed, optimized, etc.

As companies grow and processes become more complex, a natural desire arises to automate all these activities

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BusinessSystem

BusinessProcess

InformationSystem

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Process

BusinessSoftwareSystem

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SupportingProcess

BusinessEntity

BusinessInformation

Object

SoftwareBusiness

ObjectmanipulatesApplication

Program

manipulates

manipulates

models

representsimplements

From Enterprise System to Application Program

Car rental documents

Car

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4BPM and MDA -The Rise of Model-Driven Enterprise Systems

Business Process Definition Davenport1 1993 defines a (business) process as:

a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market.

It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what.

A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs

Taking a process approach implies adopting the customer’s point of view.

Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.”

1Davenport, Thomas (1993), Process Innovation: Reengineering work through information technology, Harvard Business School Press, Boston

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Business Process Management The goal of Business Process Management (BPM) is to

promote continuous growth and change of business processes.

This goal arises from the need of today’s businessorganizations to rapidly create and modify value chains.

BPM supports the goal by promoting computer-assisted business process management.

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BPM loop

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"Enterprise Business Process Management –Architecture, Technology and Standards", Donald F. Ferguson, Marcia Stockton, 2006

BPM loop: Model The most popular modelling tools are white boards,

followed closely by Microsoft® Office However, there is an increasing trend to more formal

and rigorous modelling Some organizations use focused tools, e.g. WebSphere® Business

Modeler or Intalio. Formal modelling has two major benefits:

1. Precise notation: Formal models can capture information precisely, whereas if you use PowerPoint or white boards, people who were not in the room do not know what your dotted arrows or purple circles mean.

2. Reliable hand-offs: Modelling tools can generate implementation templates and the structure of the supporting applications (SOA services), business processes and artefacts. This is less error-prone than reading documents and guessing the

desired application behaviour. Bad things happen when programmers guess.

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BPM loop: Assemble Historically, programmers think of “building” an

application, or elements of an application. Just as the designers of electronic hardware seldom design

elements from the ground up anymore, but assemble existing components and assemblies of components into larger-scale devices, the trend in software is increasingly moving to assembling an application, or business process. Packaged and pre-existing applications provide much of the

necessary function. Implementing the business model and its changes often

simply requires assembling (and configuring) existing applications into a composite application that integrates the existing systems.

A business process coordinates the integrated composite application. This is often accompanied by some development of new services to

complete the business process.

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BPM loop: Assemble Assembly has two sub-models:

1. Structure: Which services, processes and artefacts comprise the composite application? What are the governing policies?

2. Behaviour: What are the sequences/control flows of calling the applications? What is the data flow? What are the state transitions?

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BPM loop: Deploy & Run The newly assembled, existing and configured

applications run on an IT infrastructure systems, application servers and middleware, packaged

applications … The deploy phase maps the application artefacts and

configuration information to the systems and software environments

However, the incremental nature of deployment creates enormous challenges. The applications, processes and data formats change while existing applications and transactions are executing Imagine changing the flight control system of a trans-

Pacific flight.

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BPM loop: Monitor Monitoring is the observation of the executing

composite applications There are two types of monitoring:

1. IT monitoring observes throughput, response, resource utilization, problem events, etc. This enables change, for example allocating more servers, to improve satisfaction of business goals (for example, the time to process a purchase order).

2. Business monitoring observes the execution of the solution. (For example, did a purchase order fail a credit check or require manual intervention? Emit an event when a credit check fails.)

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BPM loop: Monitor The stream of business events enables intervention

and reaction. Part of the business process definition may be event

filters, which look for events or event streams matching a pattern.

A filter for the credit check failure event may trigger an email or instant message to the account representative. Aggregating events into summaries interesting to

employees, and making the summaries available through email or a Web portal, is extremely common.

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BPM loop: Monitor A common element of business models is key performance

indicators (KPIs). KPIs provide a way for businesses to measure the success of their business models. Continuing the purchase order example, the business may want to: Achieve a target value for purchase orders. If they fall short of

the goal, one possible business action is to modify the personalization and product suggestions on their portal.

Reduce cost through eliminating manual approval of purchase orders. If the business is not meeting the goal, they may need to modify and extend the rules in the rule system that automates approval.

Business events supply the data that are the basis for KPIs. The solutions store the events in a data warehouse and perform analytics to compute KPIs.

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BPM loop: Monitor The event and KPI models are explicit elements of

the business process model These elements flow through all steps in the

Model-Assemble-Deploy-Monitor loop: Business modelling defines the taxonomy and formats

for events, the KPIs and the event filters and actions The assemble phase realizes the model constructs the deploy and run phases emit the events

Standards emerge in this space, for example: Web Services Distributed Management Event Format

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BPMS A Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) —

which is a suite of software tools — managesprocesses in a “process base” that is external to individual applications Multiple applications can then reuse the processes Formal process models play a crucial role in a BPMS

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"BPM and SOA: Where does one end and other begin?"

Business Process Management (BPM): empowers a business analyst to align IT systems with strategic

business goals by: creating well defined enterprise business processes,

each business process is modelled as a set of individual processing tasks Tasks are typically implemented as services within the enterprise

monitoring their performance, and optimizing for greater operational efficiencies

BPMS: provides a toolset that:

allows the business analyst to create process models, using notations such as BPMN,

performs the business process automation, or execution of the model, by invoking the services

additionally, the BPM system may provide monitoring and management capabilities

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Key BPMS tool abilities Usually BPMS tools include the ability to:

model a business process BPMN, XPDL, …

link elements of the process model to human interfaces, software components, and databases that are used in the runtime execution of the process ESB (Enterprise Services Bus) might be used here

manage the actual execution of the process by calling human or software components, or by acquiring or storing data as prescribed by the process description

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Main parts of BPM suite

Orchestration and choreography Process orchestration

Orchestration describes (one) executable business process from one role perspective.

May call external web services

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Orchestration and choreography Process choreography

Defines contract between several roles committed to one business process. Each role declares its choreography interface.

A choreography is a specification of an exchange between two or more participants.

A choreography (as a process) is distinct from the processes of participants. Consequently, participants can agree on a choreography while

retaining control over how their internal processes comply with the choreography

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Orchestration and choreography Business process modelling languages

Orchestration BPMN 1.0 and 2.0 – Business Process Modeling Notation

Created by BPMI (bpmi.org), currently managed by OMG BPEL (WS-BPEL) – Business Process Execution Language

Standardised by OASIS

Choreography WS-CDL – Web Services Choreography Description Language

Created by W3C's Choreography Working Group BPMN 2.0

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BPMN example

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Goal – agile business processes Drag and drop of activities – no manual coding

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Company acquisitions 08-2007 Metastorm (Workflow) buys Proforma (BP Modelling) 06-2007 IBM (Platform) buys TeleLogic (BP and UML Modelling) 05-2007 TIBCO (EAI-Workflow) buys Spotfire (BI) 04-2007 Software AG (Platform) buys webMethods (EAI) 11-2006 IBM (Platform) buys Filenet (Documentation) 06-2006 EMC2-Documentum (Documentation) buys ProActivity (BPMS) 03-2006 BEA (Platform) buys Fuego (BPM engine) 12-2005 Intalio (BPM Engine) buys FiveSight (BPEL) 10-2005 Metastorm (Workflow) merges with CommerceQuest (EAI) 09-2005 Fair Isaac (Rules) buys RulesPower (Rules) 07-2005 Seagull Software (Middleware) buys Oak Grove Systems (BPM

engine) 06-2005 Sun (Platform) buys SeeBeyond (EAI) 04-2005 TeleLogic (Modeling) buys Popkin (BP modelling) 06-2004 Oracle (Platform/Database/ERP) buys Collaxa (BPEL) 06-2004 TIBCO (EAI) buys Staffware (Workflow) 04-2004 Adobe (Documents) buys Q-Link (Workflow) 09-2002 IBM (Platform) buys Holosofx (BP Modelling)

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