07.06.10
The Stars are Aligned for BPM
[Cartoon]
The stars are out: IBM, Oracle, MetaStorm, Progress Software, etc. The Forester and Gartner telescopes are focused in on the latest BPM (Business Process Management) offerings. The “stars” have everything you need. Besides having fantastic visual modeling tools to map out processes, they have the entire infrastructure needed for a complete implementation.
BPM is far from new. From IBM’s early days of business machines, the goal has always been to automate business processes. It has always been about processing documents by taking in requests and producing responses. IBM started this with punched cards. Now, almost any form of data can form a request and a response.
Most of the early solutions have been totally proprietary. Once an organization selected a vendor, they were tied to that vendor. Having the ability for one vendor’s process to communicate with another’s was highly unusual.
Today’s products are not purely proprietary. They are based upon industry standards. Two of the most important underlying standards driving BPM are web services and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Web services encompass multiple standards that define the protocol, the data, the processes, and security. Services can be built by any provider and be understood and processed by another. The BPEL language brings the asynchronization needed for long-running business processes.
BPEL components are web service providers and web service consumers. The integration of components is infinite. Web services from any provider can be consumed by any vendor’s BPEL components.
Without some overall governance, the construction of business processes and services could become chaotic. This is where the “stars” come out. Even though their underlying technologies will allow for almost any form of integration, they provide tools to model at a higher level. They provide visual tools that do not require an IT background to use.
The “stars” also recognize one very important fact. Success is dependent upon a strong Enterprise Architecture. The Enterprise Architects not only make sure that there is adequate infrastructure in place to support a BPM initiative, but they also make sure that top-down business models have been developed. The top-down models provide the definitions of the organization’s processes and data needed to avoid the chaos.
Closing the Business / IT gap
