New tools in Oracle BPM Suite 12c put BPM in the mold of business architecture (BA). This new version contains new BA model types and features that help companies to move out of the IT-based, rather technical view of business processes automation and into strategic process improvement. Thus, these new model types help us to embark on the journey towards enterprise BPM.

This is an interesting step in evolution of enterprise middleware—Oracle is the first vendor of a business process automation engine that moved up from concrete automated processes to strategic views on end-to-end processes, thus crossing the automation/strategic barrier.

BPM Suite 12c introduces cross-departmental business process views. Thereby, it allows us to approach an enterprise modeling exercise through top-down modeling. It has become an end-to-end value chain model that sits on top of processes. It chains separated business processes together into one coherent...