Enterprise Business Process Management - Architecture, Technology and Standards

All enterprises’ operations require integrating information, and processing information with applications. This has been true for decades, if not centuries. Information and application integration has evolved from completely person centered verbal communication (blacksmith to apprentice), through paper documents-mail-fax, email and Web page interactions. The information and applications control the flow of goods and operations on them. These are the business processes of the economy. In some cases, enterprises are almost purely information processing businesses, e.g. insurance. The past few years have seen explosive growth in direct program-program interaction for application integration. This removes manual steps. The improvements in reliability and efficiency are tremendous. Controlling the sequence of program interactions and information flow is fundamental to an enterprise’s functions. Knowing the status of the flows is equally fundamental. Automating, monitoring and optimizing the flow is the field of business process management. The past two years have seen the emergence of several architectural and standards based innovations. This paper provides a technical overview of the standards, architecture, programming and runtime models that make modern BPM possible. The paper focuses on the end-to-end model. We also describe concepts that are not widely documented elsewhere, and do not discuss well-documented concepts. For example, we do not describe BPEL4WS or WSDL. We do, however, explain the role of SOA containers and their enablement of automatic process monitoring. In biology, convergent evolution is a powerful explanatory paradigm. Platypuses and otters are strikingly similar animals despite being extremely unrelated. Their evolutionary paths converged. An analogous phenomenon is occurring in the business world. A business architecture defines the structure and behavior of an enterprise. An IT or application architecture describes how the computing systems are structured. Coming from vastly different starting points, the business architectures’ and IT architectures’ evolutionary paths are converging. The exposition briefly discusses the co-evolution of enterprise business designs and IT solutions. 1 Model – Assemble – Deploy – Monitor Figure 1 provides an overview of end-to-end business process management (BPM). Business professionals collaborating with IT professionals define a model (architecture) of the business. Often the model is simply a set of “business processes,” such as the steps involved in processing a purchase order. Additionally, the model may include business artifacts (purchase order, bill of materials), policies (schedule premier customers ahead of others) and the business components (shipping department, finance and accounting). The business model could include key performance indicators (KPIs). Examples of KPIs include: percentage of purchase orders that complete without manual intervention, or average dollar value of submitted shopping carts. These KPIs directly measure business performance, e.g. profit, customer satisfaction. Enterprise Business Process Management 2 Shared Model(s) Shared Model(s) Assemble