Speak Softly and Carry a Big BPM Suite

This fits in nicely with organizations' service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives. These initiatives expose business assets as reusable "services" that can be shared across applications. But having an infrastructure of services is not itself an end goal. SOA only becomes useful when those services are assembled into composite applications. This is when you benefit from service reusability, reducing application development time and lowering the incremental cost of future process automation. BPM is therefore a natural fit to combine with your SOA. BPM becomes the glue, sitting on top of the SOA, orchestrating calls to services from within enterprise processes. BPM makes it faster and cheaper to build applications on top of your SOA. The more services the IT organization exposes through the SOA, the more building blocks the business has to build BPM-based composite applications.

Based on modular services, applications built with BPM and SOA also have greater tolerance for change compared with tightly coupled applications that trap business logic in internal code. These services can be updated independently from the overall application without bringing the entire system down. This greatly simplifies enhancements and ongoing maintenance. Moreover, the interfaces for the services are well-defined, making it simpler to swap new services in and out of processes.

What other synergies exist? Well, BPM's native security and monitoring tools can be used to control access to services in your SOA and even monitor usage. This makes sure that only authorized users are calling your services under appropriate circumstances. Additionally, by monitoring all activities in a process, BPM can provide real-time reports on service performance, including completion times, uptime percentage and success-to-failure ratios. Service level agreements can be enforced, and breaches can be sent directly to the appropriate manager's inbox.

Fundamentally, organizations want to build applications faster, manage them better and make them easier to change. BPM and SOA are a perfect match for helping to get there.

Human Workflow: Is that BPM in Your Pocket?

But with all this talk of component architecture and service orchestration, haven't we forgotten about the people? Clearly, tying together Web services from an SOA into processes is only half the story. On the people side, human workflow features have helped to put the "B" back into BPM. Organizations realize that not all good ideas come in boardrooms. Often the people on the front lines have the best insights into where processes are breaking down. Therefore, companies must mine their knowledge workers for promising ideas and innovative recommendations on how to improve the organization's processes. As a result, BPM today provides collaboration technology, knowledgebase repositories and other tools that help to bring process management and process control to more people in varying roles.

BPM has cast a wider net by allowing employees to seamlessly interact with processes. This means allowing people to communicate with processes using mediums they are accustomed to. BPM plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook and Office, for instance, enable users to participate in processes—complete tasks, view reports, route documents—all from an environment with which they are already familiar.

But the work here is ongoing. BPM technology will continue to evolve new and better ways for users to seamlessly interact with the process engine through mediums such as email, IM, text messaging and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). The day is not far off when people will receive voicemails from their process engines, enabling them to escalate or reroute work via voice commands from their cell phones or mobile devices. Any medium people currently use to communicate with others is ripe with opportunity for creating seamless inroads to process management.

The bottom line is that for BPM to work, people must participate. This means making process management easy to use and accessible from whatever device happens to be in the end-user's pocket.

Assessing the Architectural Approach BPM has made great strides in helping organizations manage and control their business processes. It is helping put business users back in the driver's seat of process strategy. At the same time, BPM is helping organizations get more out of common IT initiatives like SOA. However, this architectural approach is also being coupled with a focus on the people—cultivating the ideas and innovation of employees and allowing them to seamlessly participate in processes from the tools they are familiar with using. Given the strategic importance of BPM to both the business and IT, some companies are hesitant to disclose everything they are doing for fear of giving their competitors a roadmap to success. However, even for companies that choose to speak softly about their strategic process initiatives, it is becoming more and more likely that internally they are carrying a big BPM suite.

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