BPM (Businesss Process Management) Vendor Research for model driven processes

BPM and related technologies have been evolving during the past two decades and therefore this blog is about a research on IBM BPM (Businesss Process Management) solutions and products which is the vendor I chose from gartner report list of active vendors in this area.

For those who just hear the name of BPM, I clarify what is BPM?!  BPM is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into your organization. Discover, document, automate, and continuously improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Enterprise information systems can improve the efficiency of businesses through the automation of business processes. The objective of almost every company is that the applications it uses, should provide comprehensive support for business processes.

This means that applications should align with business processes closely. Here are the key core and basic components of BPM included but not limited to:

• Modeling and simulation
• Policies and rules
• Collaboration through human task processing
• Content-centric processing
• Process execution including choreography and orchestration

The loss of alignment between the business and IT has a name IT gap. An IT gap is a common occurrence in almost every company. It is mainly a consequence of the inability of application developers to modify and adapt the applications to business requirements quickly and efficiently.

Here is a little history of how it got started by the introduction of flow charts (credited to Frank Gilberth in 1921) to express process flows was possibly the first noteworthy notational style relevant to today’s business process modeling. Using simple symbols to represent process elements like start, end, input/output, tasks, decisions, conditionals, flow direction (arrows), branching (forks, joins), and conditionals, flow charts are able to document processes and algorithms, and remain highly popular among technical and nontechnical people even today.

IBM has 4 featured BPM software products: IBM Blueworks Live, IBM Business Monitor, IBM Business Process Manager and Websphere Operational Decision Manater

IBM BlueworksLive is an easy way to document and run processes in the cloud. Their slogan is Process made simple. And indeed after spending two hours watching the video tutorial and playing with the exercises, I feel you can do a lot with this tool, it easily captures processes and share the thoughts, goals and problems and also it gives a better understanding to all the individuals who are involved in the process. For example I did develop this business process diagram through the blueworks in almost 7 minutes which it shows the high level map and flow of activites involved to go through the process of developing a web portal from a perspective of a business owner.

IBM’s BPM BlueWorks is a cloud-based BPM entry point offering that allows business users (including leaders and analysts) to create, share, and collaborate on strategy maps, capability models, and process models. They can also leverage a vast collection of pre-built BPM content and contributions from other BPM experts and users around the world to move quickly from strategy mapping to process execution. The core intent of BPM BlueWorks is not only to allow you to quickly ramp onto BPM, but also to allow you to:

• Collaborate with a vast community and leverage pre-built business strategy maps, capability maps, processes, and measures
• Leverage industry-specific content provided by IBM and created by others to understand the value of BPM
• Use cloud based, no-installation needed, easy on-ramp to IBM BPM suite to test and deploy process
• Capture business intent, capabilities, and process in the cloud

In BPM BlueWorks, the Business Design spaces provide the web-based, collaborative environment for designing and building business documents as a part of the solutions or applications you intend to build. These business documents allow you to visually represent and communicate your business strategies, capabilities, processes, and your future business direction. Using the business design widgets, you can:

• Define a business strategy using strategy maps (associated goals, measures, strengths, and threats)
• Design a business structure using capability maps
• Design a process using process maps that are based on the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard
• Visually represent how your processes collaborate with other internal and external processes
• Create and reuse a standard business vocabulary to store standard terms, roles, business items, and messages
• Build service documents to specify service operations that can be reused in process maps
• Build organization charts to represent the structure of your business and assign the appropriate process and capability-level responsibilities for different units within your organization

Anyone can sign up with BPM BlueWorks (the first registered user for a company or group becomes the BPM BlueWorks administrator for that company/group. Subsequent registrations for the company/group are approved by the administrator) by going to www.bpmblueworks.com.

You can build organization charts, Strategy maps, Capability maps, Process maps, Business vocabulary, long-running process  and microflow, test modules and components and test configurations.

Upto this point all I said was about the enabled cloud platform, but underlying ideas of BPM is enabled by SOA. And I did write before about SOA, and I think it is vital to give a little overview about IBM BPM approach which is enabled by SOA framework which allow process automation. Here is a very good view of how SOA and BPM are integrated:

IBM Websphere Business Modeler offers process modeling, simulation and analysis capabilities through the integration tools that comes with the modeler.

There are so much more to say, however I am sure this was a good starting point for familiarity of IBM products for applying and using BPM and the main architecture behind the scene.