Business Process Management (BPM) und Business Rules Management (BRM) zusammen in einer service-orientierten Architektur (SOA) sind die methodischen und technischen Voraussetzungen, um Geschäftsprozesse zu industrialisieren und agil zu sein. BPM schafft die Automatisierung und Standardisierung von Geschäftsprozessen, BRM die Standardisierung und Transparenz von Management-Politiken und -Prinzipien. Und eine SOA bringt die Service-Orientierung, die uns erlaubt zwischen spezifischen Logiken einzelner Prozesse und prozessübergreifenden Logiken gebündelter Kompetenzen und Dienstleistungen sauber zu trennen. Das schafft Agilität zusammen mit Industrialisierung.
Every organization has 4 other domains in which BPM projects are executed; Corporate Performance Management (CPM), IT architecture Management (ITAM) and Governance Risks and Compliance (GRC), Core Application Framework (CAF/SAP). The Enterprise BPM framework can be also used in all these domains, which results in 5 maturity models including the ERP/SAP maturity model (see figure below).
EDA is more a manifestation of finite state machines going all the way back to Alan Turing. Old_State + Event = Some_Action + New_State. It is the simplest, yet most powerful way to design robust systems. I only wish more people would give it due consideration.
A very old implementation example is I/O interrupts (hardware events) for asynchronous I/O - real time event handling which enabled multitasking operating systems.
Many want to use web services for everything now and at times it is hard to convince people that other messaging schemes and standards are a better fit for some problems.
Function answers the question --- what is being done?Technique answers the question -- how something being done?
Application answers the question --- what is the problem being solved?
ExamplesBusiness Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an application type, it solves the problem of controlling the business activities in order to optimize the business, deal with exceptions etc...Business Rules are type of technique --- which can be used to infer facts from other facts or rules (inference rules) , or to determine action when event occurs and condition is satisfied (ECA rules) and more (there are at least half a dozen types of rules, which are techniques to do something).Event Processing is really a set of functions which does what the name indicates -- process events --- processing can be filtering, transforming, enriching, routing, detect patterns, deriving and some more.
CEP module receives or intercepts a flurry of events and processes them with the objective of figuring out what those events are relevant for; it triggers the appropriate business processes or decision services
BPM module receives the request for a given process to be applied to a higher level entity (an application, a document...); it automates the steps defined in the business process
BRMS module is invoked with a given context to apply business rules; it makes a business decision
I had an interesting chat with Miko Matsumura VP and Deputy CTO of Software AG the other day. While we ranged widely, the official topic was Software AG’s launch of AlignSpace. AlignSpace is a hosted “Social BPM” solution supporting collaborative process discovery. The idea is that it will combine:
Social networking (around process definitions)
Collaborative design of processes
Translation of a wide variety of process models
A process marketplace
There aren’t many specific details yet (the site has an overview of these things but no details) but Miko discussed some of the key characteristics he felt an offering would need to deliver on this idea of social BPM:
Easy to use, low barrier to entry so those with process know-how but not technical skills (in modeling for instance) can participate.
A pricing model that let’s people participate even those with a fairly small role
Widespread access so that everyone can participate
Independence so that companies are not excluded because of their technology or standards choices.
Community - it is not enough to have “social media” features, it must actually build a community around processes
A marketplace of experts, skills and information must be created so people can buy and sell process expertise.
Vergleichbar mit BPMS werden nicht alle Anwender diese komplexe Funktionalität eines BRMS in gleichem Umfang nutzen. Entscheiden für einen Einsatz eines komplexen Management von Geschäftsregeln ist die Komplexitiät der Regeln. Grundsätzlich entscheidend für den Einsatz von regelbasierten Prozessen ist ja immer noch, wieviele Prozesse automatisierte werden können/müssen, wie komplex diese Prozesse sind und wie “teuer” es ein Unternehmen kommt, diese Prozesse nicht zu automatisieren. Entscheidend für den Einsatz eines ausgewachsenen BRMS ist deshalb immer noch, wie schnell ein Unternehmen auf Veränderungen am Markt reagieren können muss, wie agil ein Unternehmen sein muss.
There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes. The apparent benefits revolve around faster reaction to competitors and markets, as well as quick response to management and collaborative tuning. There are more subtle opportunities to get ahead of the game and anticipate customer demand, thus creating the ability to generate incremental revenue streams that play off of increased demands. Customers may also be enabled to make changes to their individual processes as they interact with an organization. CRM efforts are struggling to have a differentiating customer experience. BPM with explicit rules will allow this experience to evolve and become individualized.
Bruce makes an interesting comment on business rules too: that “routing logic in process gateways” are not “business rules”. That doesn’t really make sense: for sure some gateways will be process-housekeeping decisions of little interest to the business user, but others will surely embed business-critical decisions. On the other hand, it has long been acknowledged that a best practice for BPM is to delegate such business decisions to a managed decision service - hence the explicit new business rule (aka decision) task in BPMN 2.0. And,in the CEP world, for tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents to invoke a decision managed by its Decision Manager tool.
Technically, BPM/Business Rules approach place process logic with the BPM suite and decision logic in the business rules management system (BRMS). The process logic in a BPM suite sequences and controls activities and launches and cancels processes. Control is achieved with timers and exception handlers. Processes can be designed to recover from errors, restart processes and coordinate activities. The BRMS effectively designs, organizes and executes the logic behind a process decision. An effective BRMS can handle any depth and complexity of decision logic, including computationally complex logic and dense logic.
The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture, Event Driven Architecture, Software as a Service, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing (CEP). In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed - IT services which are associated with the business process steps. Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of a process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services. A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organizations.
M. Golfarelli, S. Rizzi, and I. Cella. DOLAP '04: Proceedings of the 7th ACM international workshop on Data warehousing and OLAP, page 1--6. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2004)