Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Overview of this book

JBoss jBPM is a free, open-source, business process management solution. It enables users to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services. A business process is a sequence of activities triggered by a certain input that results in a valuable output. Business Process Management is about analyzing those activities in a structured way and eventually supporting their execution with a workflow application. This allows for the following results: Better management visibility of their business: improved decision making Low cost of inputs: de-skilled labor requirements, less waste, standardized components Better outputs: consistent quality, more customer satisfaction Businesses have always tried to manage their processes, but software such as jBPM brings the methodology and management theory to practical life. JBoss jBPM offers the following key features: Graphical process definition Flexibility to integrate code into the graphical process definition A customizable web-based workflow application that runs the process you’ve defined Easy programming model to extend the graphical process definition A process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of process definition languages and Java. Easy to integrate with other systems through the JBoss middleware suite.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Monitoring the process


Business Activity Monitoring, or "BAM", is a buzzword that is bandied around a lot by consultants and management, but unfortunately, it is generally poorly understood. Usually, this results in business process management projects being told to, "do some BAM", but this vague instruction is open to interpretation and often leads to poorly-thought out implementations that don't provide anything valuable.

So, before we dive in and, "do some BAM", we'd better understand exactly what we are talking about. In reality, there are three different sides to process monitoring:

  • Process management

  • Process metrics analysis

  • Process forecasting

You'll notice that none of these actually include "Business Activity Monitoring". I have deliberately shied away from this catch-all terminology in order to work with a tighter definition of what we actually want to achieve by monitoring our process. The combination of these three elements will encompass everything that is usually meant by "business...