What this book covers
Chapter 1, Business Process Management, Service-oriented Architecture, and Enterprise Architecture, discusses the importance of business processes and their relevance to IT, application systems, enterprise architecture, reference models, and modeling principles. It describes the business architecture and enterprise architecture, describes their relation to business processes, and digs into business process management and its life cycle. It discusses the key concepts of process modeling, adaptive case management, and process execution, monitoring, and analytics. It explains process optimization. Finally, it explains how SOA and BPM fit together and discusses new frontiers for SOA.
Chapter 2, Modeling Business Processes for SOA – Methodology, describes strategies and methodologies that can help us realize the benefits of BPM as a successful enterprise modernization strategy. It discusses a set of actions in the course of a complete methodology in order to create the desired attractiveness toward broader application throughout the enterprise. It describes organizational and cultural barriers to apply enterprise BPM and discusses ways to overcome them.
Chapter 3, BPMN for Business Process Modeling, introduces the fundaments of business process modeling using a standard-based approach. It explains the concepts of using Business Process Model and Notation 2, a standard developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). BPMN 2 has gained the capability not only to model, but also to execute processes. From strategy modeling all the way to modeling executable business processes, this chapter discusses best practices to model business processes on different levels of decomposition.
Chapter 4, Process-driven Service Design, discusses best practices and patterns to design services. It explains the guidelines for service design in relation to BPM and demonstrates key service design principles. This chapter discusses service granularity, categories, data in the context of services, and how application services, cloud or on-premise, can be incorporated into your executable process.
Chapter 5, Composite Applications, explains key ways to architect and design the backend services that comprise the composite application. In this chapter, best practices for integration to backend systems, complex orchestrations, data validations, and calculations are explained. Also, some tools, such as templates, are used that help to create a successful solution that follows consistent architecture and design standards.
Chapter 6, Process Execution with BPMN and BPEL, outlines a set of guidelines to actually implement business processes and the associated services. This chapter describes how to define an implementation roadmap, explains how to implement the Service Facade and Delegation patterns in BPEL, discusses the right level of variances, highlights the degrees of coupling between technical components, and sets out a series of best practices, for example, naming conventions for composite partitions.
Chapter 7, Human Interaction with Business Processes, explains in depth what the integration of human actors means for process-driven applications, especially about the challenges from an architectural, conceptual, and technical perspective. Considerations with reference to UI design principles and user experience during development of user-centric processes and the corresponding inbox applications are discussed. The impact of the task-based approach on end users is also considered.
Chapter 8, Business Rules, outlines how a transparent enterprise decision management can be supported by IT by automating business decisions. It describes the characteristics of business rules and their relation with BPM; explains how to identify and assess business rules, that is, business rules candidates; discusses how to design, organize, and implement business rules; and depicts the Oracle Business Rules design time as well as the runtime architecture and its concepts. Finally, it discusses best practice approaches to implement business rules.
Chapter 9, Adaptive Case Management, gives all the overview information that is needed to fully understand the ideas behind ACM. It explains the characteristics of ACM, its relation to business analytics, shows how to model a case, how to build your own UI on top, and presents best practices.
Chapter 10, Mobile and Multichannel, explains the integration of mobile and BPM, provides best practices to design the architecture to enable multichannel access, accesses human tasks and BAM from mobile, and explains best practices for multichannel.
Chapter 11, Event Processing and BPM, explains what event processing is, why it is of interest to combine it with BPM, and how this can be achieved. It answers questions such as what is fast data and what is event processing, explains key elements of event processing and the different types of event processing, and compares event processing with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). It provides conceptual architecture for event processing and explains how event processing fits into a modern architecture.
Chapter 12, Business Activity Monitoring, shows how Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can help an organization gain insight into business operations and outcomes in real time, thus enabling optimization, efficiency gain, and ongoing improvement to the business processes. This chapter defines the capabilities that a BAM platform should provide and the different types of insights that it delivers. It clarifies the difference between BAM and traditional Data Warehouse-based reporting solutions and describes how BAM integrates into SOA and BPM to monitor business processes and services in real time. It also presents a methodology and best practices to design and build BAM dashboards and the supporting data objects.
