Posts Tagged ‘Business Process’


Oracle BPM 11g Preview at Oracle Open World 2009

October 13th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • 4 Comments »

I think the wait was worth it. After BEA’s AquaLogic BPM (formerly Fuego) was purchased by Oracle, the product became part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite. But instead of being in the lime-light of Fusion, for the past year it was hardly mentioned. The Marketing story focused on SOA, Tuxedo, WebCenter and WebLogic. For BPM pure-plays, BPM has its own story, a good story; one with business centered not IT centered values.

Well there it is! It re-appeared in a General Session at Oracle Open World 2009 with all the other Fusion Middleware products. The product development team must have been busy. They took Aqualogic BPM apart and re-assemble it with more features and benefits for the business than ever before. Eduardo Chiocconi and Mariano Benitez demonstrated the new version of BPM at the Moscone West Exhibit hall. The product has been integrated with JDeveloper and Enterprise Manager. It is part of the Fusion middleware product suite and seems to have more capability than before.

For businesses, the need for a rich user-experience has been achieved. The BPM studio is integrated with the ADF development environment; a JSF-based technology. You can develop UIs from studio or import ADF projects and use them in interactive BPM activities. This segmentation of the business process from the UI should also allow the UI to take advantage of externally developed UIs; something that was lacking before in BPM. This segmentation may make it easier to integrate legacy UI applications, perhaps even UIs not based in ADF.

BPM 11g has also improved on the type of roles available for activities. You can now specify interactive tiers for approval or review activities. For instance, if the CFO needs to approve purchases over $100,000, then the work-item can be escalated without coding specialized escalation processes to route the purchase orders based on these rules. These rules of who and when people need to review or approve work can change. BPM now handles this without the need for re-writing and re-deploying the new processes. An administrator can simple re-configure the user-roles.

BPM 11g has many other features as well. It has a state-of-the-art rules engine. It can handle most business rules and conditional requirements without the need to integrate third-party rules engines. It has a new milestone activity switch to enhance business activity monitoring and instance processing by the workspace. It also has integrated Oracle BAM to enhance the ability to obtain information about the business process.

BPM 11g adds these features on top of the 10g BPM feature set, so the return for implementing BPM is improved. I was only able to get a glimpse of the new Oracle BPM 11g, but from this glimpse I am excited about the possibilities. Oracle 11g will not be available for download until Feb 2010. I am looking forward to getting my hands on the new version and feel at this time, the wait will be worth it.

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Oracle spotlights BPM in Fusion Middleware Story

October 12th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • No Comments »

After hearing the Fusion Middleware story many times now, I am so relieved and happy to see Business Process Management (BPM) in the spot light once again.  During the Oracle Open World 2009 General Session “Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation” we heard about SOA, the Enterprise 2.0 Portal and Tuxedo; but what is that? We were given a demo of the new Oracle BPM 11g application development environment. We got to see swim-lanes, process models, simulations and dash-boards. They showed how you can obtain process model metrics and key performance indicators for your process.  They made significant improvements over the way BPM integrates with applications and systems.

I feel this completes the Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Story. BPM spans the entire Fusion product suite and needs to be in the spot-light. No other application takes a holistic view of the enterprise and provides a coherent platform to integrate business application the way the business needs them.  We’ve heard many times that it’s not about IT anymore. That is certainly true. It should be about Business Processes and BPM solutions needs be part of the strategy.

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Business Process Management Summary

June 2nd, 2009 by Mark Peterson • No Comments »

Over the last 8 blog postings, I have discussed how implementing a Process Oriented Architecture (POA) for Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives provides organizations with the agility needed to incrementally build out business processes. Companies can make improvements over time as the business is able to digest change. Yet the organization can leverage every process automation investment because the architectural structure binds them together to work as a whole. In this last entry in the series, I will summarize how BPM – using POA – can yield excellent savings for companies in any industry. Implementing BPM without POA strategy can save companies money by improving operational efficiencies within the organization. Using POA, companies attain further savings by the way BPM is implemented.  

 
POA allows businesses to realize immediate gains from BPM while putting the company in a position to evolve and expand these processes consistently and continuously within and across an organization. Businesses look to IT to increase productivity through automated systems and also expect IT to find ways to reduce the cost to implement these systems. Implementing a POA for BPM saves companies money by reusing common process designs for different departments.
 
POA can be an enabler for many BPM implementations. The basic process is the same, but can be customized to the specific needs of departments and individuals while providing the means to scale BPM across the organization inexpensively. Without the right architecture, an organization would have BPM in silos; separate, vertical divisions with no connection, in which case BPM may prove to be cost-prohibitive.
 
BPM often starts within a department – such as Procurement or Legal where human error can cause critical delays. As organizations dive into any single process to automate it, they find that it spans across departments or communities. Automated tasks such as order entry and document approval cut across most industries. However, these applications only improve productivity for “local” or single-department business problems. The productivity for the given task was greatly improved, but it didn’t solve company-wide business problems such as: Did the order make it to fulfillment? Did the offer letter get processed properly by HR? Did the final report get assembled and submitted on time with proper management oversight and control? 
 
Gaining real productivity improvements and cost savings comes from having local processes working efficiently, and having a connection between each of the local processes. BPM and POA connect all of the vertical departments together, giving C-level executives the ability to review the entire organization to see where the bottlenecks are, where inefficiencies exist and what the cost drivers might be.
 
A key to saving money is how the BPM system itself is planned and architected. Decoupling the views and back-end systems from the business process itself utilizes reusability. In BPM system architecture, reusability means that the basic process can be customized for different communities or departments in an organization. 
 
POA organizes the process, views and the calls to the back-end systems by tightly or loosely coupling these objects as it make sense for the business. Once these components are organized in this way, current and future needs of top-level management, individual contributors and communities of users can be accounted for. The design or implementation of this POA will yield the most optimally efficient system possible because it anticipates business change. By finding commonality where it makes sense and structuring the design logically, POA can achieve what has been done for business applications (using SOA) in the realm of BPM.

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The Background of BPM

April 7th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • No Comments »
Businesses look to IT to increase productivity through automated systems. Many advances have been made in this regard, but businesses also expect IT to find ways to reduce the cost to implement these systems. Over time, systems like CRM, Document Management and Inventory Control have been created and deployed using a common platform to suit business needs for a wide array of industries.
Let me give you an example of a well-known platform and its uses. Siebel/CRM systems and Documentum/document repositories are widely accepted tools in such diverse industries as Finance, Medical, Manufacturing and Telecommunications. Even though the underlying company content differs, at a task level the systems are still performing similar tasks. For instance, order entry is a process comprised of a number of tasks which can be automated. The same goes for document approval. These kinds of tasks cut across industries.
However, these applications only improve productivity for “local” or single-department business problems. I will discuss the shortcomings of this method in my next Blog entry and an alternative concept.
Next week: The Problem
Mark J. Peterson, Senior Systems Architect for SSG, has more than 25 years of experience in software design and development with a specialization in BPM. Mark spent 10 years with Oracle and Fuego as a lead solution architect and instructor in the consulting organization.

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Business Process Management with Mark Peterson

April 1st, 2009 by Steve Steinheimer • No Comments »
SSG welcomes back Mark Peterson to the SSG Team. Mark is an experienced Business Process Management (BPM) consultant who spent the last 10 years with Oracle, Fuego and SSG. Having designed and implemented complex systems and processes and served as an Instructor of BEA ALBPM, Mark is now applying his breadth and depth of knowledge to lead SSG’s BPM practice.
Prior to his experience as a Software System Architect for Oracle Corporation/BEA, Mark held positions at M/A-Com as a Software and RF Engineer, at Raytheon as a Systems Engineer, and at Vector SGI as a Software System Architect. Mark earned his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from The University of Lowell and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University.
This week begins an eight part series about BPM, including POA – Process Oriented Architecture. We think you’ll find it compelling and informative.
BPM and POA: An Overview
Implementing a Process Oriented Architecture (POA) for Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives provides organizations with the agility needed to incrementally build out business processes. Companies can make improvements over time as the business is able to digest change. Yet the organization can leverage every process automation investment because the architectural structure binds them together to work as a whole.
I like to think of POA as being to business processes what Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is for business services. It allows businesses to realize immediate gains from BPM while putting the company in a position to evolve and expand these processes consistently and continuously within and across an organization.
BPM often starts within a department – such as Procurement or Legal where human error can cause critical delays. As organizations dive into any single process to automate it, they find that it spans across departments or communities. It is important to approach BPM in a way that ensures later process automation projects will be compatible with the first project. That’s where POA comes in – to tie together multiple processes into a larger whole for a fully orchestrated, transparent, business-centered, and automated business process.
Without the right architecture, an organization would have BPM in silos; separate, vertical divisions with no connection. This actually works fine for many applications because indeed, many people in a company do not need to worry about what’s happening in other areas. However, C-level management always needs to cut across the entire organization to see where the bottlenecks are, where inefficiencies exist and what the cost drivers might be.

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AIA Origins – The XML and Java Factor

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

AIA and SOA are all based on industry standards that have developed over the last 10-15 years. Several of the key standards were Java and XML.

With the advent of the World Wide Web there was a whole new emphasis on sharing information through the Internet. Everywhere developers were trying to come up with common ways to do this using Java.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was an eventual outcome of the idea of building re-usable building blocks of programming code (usually in Java).

These shared blocks of code in the Web World became known as Services and were usually executing on a Web Server. They were originally considered “Web” services but over time that changed to include other languages and non-web environments.

At the same time HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was becoming popular because of the World Wide Web and developers saw the potential to use a variant, called XML (Extended Markup Language) for sharing information between Services.

XML is an easy way to describe sets of information in a language friendly method. XML is nice because you can define anything you want and transmit it as a set of characters. A good piece of XML includes both the data and descriptions of what the data is. That’s different from traditional transactions which only include the data. Here’s an XML example.


As you can see this is a “note” to Lou Ann from Robert. Each data field is delimited by a bracketed field name. If it were an true email it would have definitely many more data elements like email addresses, dates, etc.. But as you can see the XML does a good job of describing what is being sent and then providing the actual data. It’s human readable which is also a nice feature.

Once XML became popular other things were built on top of it using the same concept. One was WSDL(”wisdull”). Web Services Definition Language is an XML document that describes what a Service is and what it does and what it requires. Think of it as a resume’ for a Service.

If you want to talk to a Service you ask for it’s WSDL and then you know all of the important details about it. But what if the Service is not Java or some modern language? What if it was Cobol? No problem.

If you have a Cobol program that accepts input, does some function and provides a result you can make it look like a Service as well. That would require WSIF or Web Services Invocation Framework. This is a Java Applications Programming Interface (API) that allows non-Java formats to work with other Services.

Soon other XML-based solutions came along like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) which is a way to send messages between Services using XML.

The combination of Java and XML was a real change agent for sharing information both inside organizations using their IntrAnet and with partners using the Internet.

Now, let’s see if we can get back closer to the topic of AIA by understanding more about SOA.

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