The goal of this document is to help corporations of all sizes and across industries to identify areas where business process management (BPM) technology can offer the greatest return for their available resources today while providing a technology foundation to support future initiatives. Perfectly suited for organizations with limited IT resources and budget, this guide offers recommendations for advanced technology solutions that don’t require wholesale changes to legacy systems or a brand-new enterprise-wide strategic technology direction.
There is only one certainty when a process is automated, and that is that the process will have to change. The need for change may be caused by organizational dynamics, the market environment, or by competitor actions. The key to effectively managing and proactively embracing process change is having complete visibility into all aspects of your business – including instant access to the information you need to make intelligent business decisions and process improvements.
The convergence of BPM, SOA, Web services, and XML promises to significantly improve corporate agility, reduce time-to-market for new products and services, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency of IT systems. Chapter 6 from "Understanding SOA with Web Services" explores each of these technologies in depth and describes the pros and cons of the implementation of each. The authors also do a compare and contrast between orchestration and business process management including an examination of where BPEL falls short for BPM solutions.Exclusive members-only chapter from:
Today, Service Oriented Architecture [SOA] is being adopted by many IT organizations because it promises to make them more agile and efficient. This is possible, in large part, due to the loosely coupled nature of SOA, which enables service components to evolve without needing costly rework in existing deployments. Such agility and efficiency is also possible due to increased leverage and reuse of existing service components when building new service components.
Business process management (BPM), and the information technology systems that support it, are defined in many different ways.
The key advance of optimization over traditional BPM technologies is the ability to address both the real time optimization of individual processes in flight as well as the ability to identify strategic changes to business processes to drive long term value and cost savings. This dual mission of optimization drives efficiency improvements as well as increased process effectiveness, or alignment with business process goals and performance indicators.
Both Business Process Management and Business Rules Management software provide significant value in helping organizations to automate processes and become more consistent in their business operations. Each technology also has its own unique benefits -- this white paper describes the roles and benefits of both, and shows how a combined BPM - Business Rules solution can radically improve the agility, consistency, precision and overall performance of your business.
Adobe LiveCycle Workflow helps organizations design, deploy and manage automated business-process applications that connect systems and human interactions. This paper is an ideal introduction for professionals, architects and developers who are planning business-process automation.
In the past, workflow vendors created quite a bit of confusion in the market when trying to define workflow and how it could best be utilized. Today, that situation is being replicated with BPM. Ask 10 different vendors to define BPM or BPM suites, and you will likely get 10 variations of the definition, even though all vendors use the same basic terminology to explain it. This white paper helps organizations sort through the options in order to discover why a BPM suite is a different and more important application for process improvement than workflow engines.
Whitespace Consulting of Boston, Ma. has released survey results on Business Rules market adoption in the US. The survey discovered many companies in the F500 were performing due-diligence or piloting applications utilizing a business rules approach. Level 0 (Unaware), 1 (Adhoc) or 2 (Repeatable) on the KPI's Business Rule Maturity Model scale. The Financial Services industry, specifically the Insurance sector, appeared to be the farthest along in their experimentation, many institutions with systems already in production.
