It is becoming increasingly clear that without a clear focus on business process, a service oriented architecture cannot be useful without a business process management infrastructure. Since a true SOA plan requires that business services be created that are independent of each other, it is imperative that there be a mechanism in place to enable these components to be linked together. Many of the products that we have seen over the years have taken either a very tactical top-down or bottoms-up approach to creating processes.
However, over the past year this has begun to change. More companies are starting to focus on making tools to instantiate business process more strategic and more usable. For example, Microsoft has added some process management capabilities into the new release of Visual Studio; IBM has delivered a suite of business process tools under its WebSphere brand. Oracle has focused on process through its new fusion middleware platform. SAP has put a renewed focus on business process through its strong partnership with IDS Sheer.
Given the increasing amount of focus on business process from the major players, it is important to understand the major components of business process in SOA. SOA, as an architectural construct, is based on the notion of being able to initiate dynamic collaboration across constituents. SOA therefore requires that the component parts of how a business operates be delivered as services. These services are just that—services in isolation without business context. For example, a business service might be a claims processing model. This service will include the best practices for how a claim is designed for a company. It does not include the rules that govern its use in a specific instance—how a claim is handled when two insurance companies share a risk and the business rule for the premium charged when doing business in a high risk region. The business service does not include the details of how all the constituents involved come together to present a seamless business interaction to the customer. To implement business process management must begin with a combination of an overall business view supported by the notion of a business flow.
A key distinction between the past focus on process and where we are headed with business process is the difference between customized workflows and business process flows. Customized workflows are offerings that programmatically produce a flow between components or full applications based on the need to solve a specific problem. Business process flow software, in contrast, is designed to enable companies to create flows between business services that can be modified and changed dynamically based on changing business conditions. It separates out rules of engagement (based on certain circumstances these are the steps to follow) from business policy rules (based on corporate governance and policies for doing business overall).
What are the keys to successful business process management? Here is a list of the top ten requirements for platforms.
- Business process management must enable business analysts and managers to be able to visually design the flow between business services.
- There needs to be a two-way connection between visual design and programmatic interfaces.
- There must be a mechanism to test to see if rules across a process flow are contradictory so that the process can be audited and monitored on a continuous basis.
- Business process flow must be able to discover and monitor the various services stored in a registry in order to be able to handle a complex as well as simple application.
- Business process management systems should be implemented from a life cycle perspective, rather than based on a single implementation or aspect of an implementation.
- Performance is a key to successful process management.
- Process management must be able to work with whatever infrastructure and applications are supported within the corporate environment.
- Process management must be flexible enough to change based on roles and responsibilities and business context.
- Process management enable a combination of top down and bottoms up development.
- Process management solutions must adhere to emerging standards.
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24th January 2006: 'Mike Gordon' said:
No doubt, well defined business process is a critical success factor for a deploying SOA. That obviously needs to be followed with proper organizational change within the enterprise. This CSF( critical success factor) prevails across all impacted organizations within the enterprise thinkinb about deploying SOA. I can only speak from the IT perspective. Judith can better speak ojn behalg of all areas. From the IT angle, a set of well defined and well governed process is equally important for a successful SOA deployment. In the heart of the IT, technology and software development is always a challenge, no matter how easy it is perceived to be, by the opinions of many who dont live and breath IT. IT needs to be grounded in project management, software development and software testing process. I just like to share with all, it is critical to have well defined process for your SDLC, just to start with that. For all who are interested in getting their hands on SDLC templates that they can reuse for their SOA implementation, I suggest you search for those at Microsoft, Sun and IBM sites. Here is the URL of an alternate site with some SDLC process and templates you can use for project management, software development and software testing.
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