Book Image

Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7

Book Image

Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7

Overview of this book

By adopting an SOA approach in Business Process Management (BPM), you can make your application flexible, reusable, and adaptable to new developments. The SOA approach also gives you the potential to lower costs (from reuse), and increase revenue (from adaptability and flexibility). However, integrating basic SOA constructs (such as Process, Business Services, and Components) and core building blocks of BPM (such as Process Modeling and Enterprise Service Bus) in a real-world application can be challenging.This book introduces basic concepts of Business Integration, SOA Fundamentals, and SOA Programming Model and implements them in numerous examples. It guides you to building an Order Management application from scratch using the principles of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture and using WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB). The various detailed aspects, features, and capabilities of the product are conveyed through examplesWe begin with essential concepts on Business Integration, SOA Fundamentals and SOA Programming Model. Then we set up the development environment to build your first Hello Process and Hello Mediation applications.Gradually, we build an SOA-based Order Management Application. We cover important aspects and functions of WPS and WESB with numerous practical examples. We show how to analyze your application's business requirements and check if an SOA approach is appropriate for your project. Then you do a top-down decomposition of your application and identify its use cases, business processes, and services. Having built the SOA Application, we introduce you to various non-functional topics, including: Administration, Governance, Management, Monitoring, and Security. We also discuss deployment topologies for WPS and WESB, performance tuning, and recommended practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
WID, WPS, and WESB Tips, Tricks, and Pointers
Index

IBM's BPM enabled by SOA method


As mentioned earlier, SOA is not a technology but glue that cements the holistic relationship between IT and business. BPM again is a practice of focusing on the improvement of operations efficiencies within an organization by modeling, automating, and monitoring their core business processes. Both BPM and SOA are an art into themselves. Some of the key concerns, questions, and topics that arise when venturing into the adoption of BPM and SOA may include:

  • How to identify process metrics and KPIs which are not only aligned with my core business performance objectives, but also help me constantly improve?

  • How can I set up and implement a process governance and management framework?

  • How to identify an implementation of a continuous and iterative BPM process optimization cycle that improves business and process agility?

  • How to realize the value of applying BPM to deliver business processes?

  • What are the set of phases, associated activities, and deliverables that I should adopt for the BPM solution development and management?

So when I'm building solutions with a BPM enabled by SOA approach, what are the lifecycle phases and what do I typically do in each of the lifecycle phases? Also, how and where do WPS, WESB, and potentially other products from IBM apply to each of the lifecycle phases? Let's look at IBM's BPM enabled by SOA methodology.

IBM's BPM enabled by SOA methodology provides a structured set of activities that you can manipulate and use in the build out of SOA and BPM based solutions. By using the method correctly, you can be assured that the solution including the business processes and Business Services will be aligned with business goals and that it creates a framework for continuous improvement. As shown in the following figure, the BPM enabled by the SOA method has five primary phases, which are as follows:

  • Envision

    • Define strategy maps

    • Identify process capabilities and processes

  • Assess

    • Collect understanding of current processes, process performance, and process enablers

  • Define

    • Model future business processes, future process performance, and supporting process enablers

    • Validation of models and design

  • Execute

    • Build, test, and deploy business processes, process performance monitoring and reporting, and supporting process enablers (technology, organization, and knowledge)

  • Optimize

    • Operating, monitoring, and managing operational processes and their supporting process enablers (technology, organization, and knowledge)

  • Governance spans all phases

Tip

For detailed information on IBM's BPM enabled by SOA methodology, refer to the IBM Redpaper, Business Process Management Enabled by SOA by Anthony Catts and Joseph St. Clair:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/REDP4495.html?Open