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11.15.06
Why BPM?
 By
Bahattin Gerecci
As businesses become more sophisticated internally and interconnected externally, managers phrase BPM more often to address a need for IT systems to respond to this ever-changing business landscape at least at the same pace of change.
At the same time, they would like to keep their IT investments under control and not grow by the pace of change. They would like to leverage their past IT investments and not jeopardize the business-critical data and knowledge accumulated on the legacy systems at the expense of new breakthrough IT systems.
BPM comes into play at this point. It offers orchestration, and proposes to combine existing systems in intelligent and innovative ways so that together they could provide a solution to a present challenge in a coordinated manner. The orchestration should be around people and systems in a process-centric methodology and all these resources should act with ease towards achieving a common goal.
A true BPM implementation should provide management with controlled IT costs and leveraged legacy systems. This report will highlight a solution approach of BPM in a basic manner.
BPM and Associations
In more concrete terms, BPM is about 'workflow' and 'connection'. It is now time to explain how BPM is concerned with these terms. The proper implementation of the two with respect to the BPM methodology delivers orchestration benefits in the form of composite applications.
Workflow systems are designed to facilitate interaction between employees and systems of a business. Once designed properly, they operate efficiently to streamline business activities in an enterprise. BPM proposes a unified view of processes and workflows attached to them. In its process management methodology everything else surrounds "process" and this enhances manageability and eases flexible orchestration. This is a considerable appeal as systems like ERP incorporate several workflow packages to model all sorts of interactions in an enterprise. The shortcoming is that multiple workflow engines make management of workflows more difficult as they evolve. After some time, the design for the past might become a burden for required present workflows and thereby inhibit execution. At the end responsiveness to the business landscape is significantly eliminated.
On the connection side, BPM coordinates the cooperation of separate systems towards a common goal. BPM advocates the use of standards as an essential component of composite systems design for coordinated work. The communication among cooperating systems is enabled by the Internet and XML which helps link different applications by enabling them to speak with the same protocol. In line with that, BPM proposes standards-led SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) as a methodology for achieving increased responsiveness for businesses by transforming them into true "service" businesses. Without SOA, enterprise application integration efforts would result into spaghetti of services where several complex middleware operate in the back end to connect gigantic monolithic applications for a common goal; not to mention the cost and limitations associated.
BPM Suites and Their Offerings
With connection and workflow as main elements of an enterprise scale business cooperation and coordination in the new era, according to "The 2005 BPM Suites Report on Singularity's Singularity Process Platform" a BPM suite should possess three core tools that are able to:
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model a business process
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link elements of the process model to human interfaces, software components, and databases that are used in the runtime execution of the process
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manage the actual execution of the process by calling human or software components, or by acquiring or storing data as prescribed by the process description
A successful BPM initiative should be built upon the drivers including;
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Lower business costs and increased efficiency
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Increased adaptability and flexibility
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Lower costs of system development and support
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Lower systems implementation risks
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Better governance and compliance and better customer service
Conclusion
The continued evolution of software architectures shows that a new era of architecturing IT systems has arrived. In this era, enterprises which are facing increased sophistication of their business environment need more adaptable solutions that deliver efficiency and value both in an inexpensive way. They understand that the focus of new IT infrastructures that would support the business in the future should transform from integration to orchestration. The solution is BPM systems.
About the Author:
Working as an IT application consultant, I am interested in BPM systems and associated technologies.
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