Chapter 2. BPM Systems' Structure

Business Process Management (BPM) systems are pieces of software created with the sole purpose of guiding your processes through the BPM cycle. They were originally monolithic systems in charge of every aspect of a process, where they had to be heavily migrated from visual representations to executable definitions. They've come a long way from there, but we usually relate them to the same old picture in our heads when a system that runs all your business processes is mentioned. Nowadays, nothing is further from the truth.

Modern BPM Systems are not monolithic environments; they're coordination agents. If a task is finished, they will know what to do next. If a decision needs to be made regarding the next step, they manage it. If a group of tasks can be concurrent, they turn them into parallel tasks. If a process's execution is efficient, they will perform the processing 0.1 percent of the time in the process engine and 99.9...