More and more organizations are turning to Business Process Management in their quest for practical ways to create new business value and to streamline their operations, and to ultimately become flexible, responsive and efficient organizations.
For the last 30 years, the business world has become more process aware, and BPM has come a long way since initial iterations that relied heavily on static flowcharts to map out corporate processes in mostly unchanging organizations.
Today, BPM has become a discipline in its own right. It applies sophisticated software and best practices to model, simulate, automate, manage, and monitor processes, in order to coordinate operations with dynamic business priorities. This has given rise to unprecedented process flexibility and scalability, wherein workflows (both human and automated) are determined in real-time by events and/or outcomes within the process, and effective knowledge transfer is made possible as processes become well-documented business artifacts on which employees can be trained.
The introduction of an independent process tier represents BPM's first major contribution to business computing. It puts the management of business logic in the hands of business managers, without threatening the integrity of the application logic.
To enjoy the full benefits of BPM, processes must integrate with existing applications and systems. They require access to the functions that are locked in application silos. Today's IT organization is complex, consisting of many different applications and systems built using heterogeneous technologies, on various types of middleware, using multiple databases and running on many platforms. Hard-coding point-to-point integration with these applications is not a good solution as it creates tight coupling with the application and makes the process brittle and inflexibleThis can make the processes expensive to change and may therefore defeat the entire purpose of BPM.
This is where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes in. It provides the technical ability to create that process independence. The goal of SOA is to expose an organization's IT assets as re-usable services that can communicate and integrate more readily. SOA's aim is to provide a common communication framework to organize and describe the capabilities, usage policies and service provider locations without exposing the implementation details. It allows organizations to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion in order to address new business requirements, while providing the possibility of making the services consumable across different channels, and at the same time enabling existing legacy applications as services. The goal is to eliminate the integration headache common to many organizations today, while leveraging existing IT investments.
BPM and SOA are a natural match —together they facilitate the next phase of business process automation, deriving higher value from services. Business automation will no longer be about hard coding a function that is to be repeated infinitely.
Today, business automation through BPM and SOA is all about creating services that are re-usable in many different ways, in multiple processes that can be continually improved. Through this synergy, organizations will achieve better business and IT results than were ever possible through either discipline alone.
This book provides adequate coverage of BPM in the context of SOA, as well as a pragmatic approach to carrying out the analysis, execution and monitoring of business processes from end-to-end, using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and the automatic mapping of BPMN to the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for executing business processes in SOA.
Geoffroy de Lamalle
Business Development Manager, SOA—Europe, Middle East & Africa,
IDS Scheer AG