The main objective of information technology is to provide support for business operations. Although in the past few years, the focus on composite application development, process applications, orchestration of services, and business process management (BPM) has improved the end-to-end business process support, flexibility, and insight into business operations, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

In this book, we will focus on design principles for process-driven architectures. We will look at how service-oriented architecture (SOA) can address the key challenges of BPM. Business process management (BPM) is a very important discipline, which is closely related to the operating efficiency, competitive position, and the ability of the company to grow. Business processes are also very closely connected with IT. One of the current challenges, which we address in this book, is how to provide support for knowledge-intensive processes. Such processes are usually complex and have many variants, and modeling them in the traditional way is inappropriate. Such knowledge-intensive processes are addressed with adaptive case management (ACM).

However, the key question is how to reduce the semantic gap between business processes and applications. SOA has emerged as a solution to these problems. In this book, we will show you how we can use SOA along with BPM. We will look at the complete life cycle, starting with business process modeling and ending with the application that implements such processes. We will see that SOA introduces new approaches with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), enterprise service bus (ESB), services, human workflow, business activity monitoring (BAM), rule engines, API management, and others to fulfill the objectives. Since the early days, SOA has introduced business events and event processing, including the capability to identify complex event patterns, which has opened up new ways for loosely-coupled integration and emphasized the ability to integrate with the Internet of Things devices, which will play an important role in business processes in the future.

The enterprise architecture (EA) is the umbrella that ties together business processes, applications, data, IT infrastructure, and the strategy of a company or organization. Enterprise architecture is the master plan, which specifies how to relate and map the strategy to the business processes and business processes to the application, data, and IT infrastructure with the objective of a coherent, well-defined, and manageable system. An important part of the EA is the business architecture (BA), which provides a bridge from the business models and the whole strategy to the business processes.

In this chapter, we will look at business processes and their relevance to IT, application systems, enterprise architecture, reference models, and modeling principles. We will do the following in this chapter: