Preface

Organizations find that it's the business process that constitutes the heart of an enterprise and is a differentiating factor. They've found that it's the processes that make or break an enterprise. Operational efficiency is a differentiating factor, and research shows that it's the processes that provide operational efficiency, business visibility, and agility to an enterprise. They've concluded that, for business process and business process management, Oracle BPM guarantees better decision making and faster Enterprise response by giving enterprises high visibility into business processes.

Oracle BPM, with its continuous improvement methodology, offers process automation, agility, process improvement, adaptability, and strong collaboration of business and IT, and increases predictability, incorporate measure, and provision traceability. It lowers IT costs, enables inclusion of changes faster, and empowers business and at the same time dramatically increases customer satisfaction.

Oracle BPM is meant for all types of processes. It's based on a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interactions. Unified process foundation, powered by a unified process engine, will streamline process development, and deployment and monitoring, and will synchronize design and runtime environments. User-centric design will empower participants with the right set of tools.

Social BPM enables social collaboration with Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0, which are offered by Spaces and offer collaboration and communication. Enterprise 2.0 also offers publishing with wikis, blogs, and Mashups. Social BPM offers enterprise-wide collaboration.

Oracle BPM unifies with Oracle SOA suite and offers agility. Oracle ADF offers rich process interactions. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring offers analytics, monitoring, and end-to-end visibility. Oracle Business Rules offers decision logics, Oracle UCM offers document workflows, and AMX offers approval flow management. Oracle BPM also unifies with Business Intelligence, Complex Event Processing, and Oracle security. BPM offerings, such as application extensions and workflow consolidation drive SOA expansion.

Oracle BPM sits on top of Oracle SOA and it's the first BPMS product to execute BPMN 2.0. This empowers organizations, as what they are modeling is what they would automate and execute.

This book encompasses vision, modeling, simulation, implementation, measurement, execution, collaboration, monitoring, management, and administration of Business Processes through Oracle BPM 11g, and covers BPM unification with SOA, ADF, AMX, Workflows, Rules, WCM, and UCM through BPM 11g; and includes implementing social collaboration by Enterprise 2.0, and Web 2.0 through Spaces.