When enterprise architects discuss the future of the software landscape of their organization, they map the functional capabilities, such as customer relationship management and order management, to existing or new applications—some packaged and some custom. Then, they connect these applications by means of middleware. They typically use the notion of an integration middleware, such as an enterprise service bus (ESB), to depict the technical integration between these applications, exposing functionality as services, APIs, or, more trendy, "micro services".

These services are used by modern, more and more mobile frontends and B2B partners. For several years now, it has been hard to find a PowerPoint slide that discusses future enterprise middleware without the notion of a BPM layer that sits on top of the frontend and the SOA service layer. So, in most organizations, we find a slide deck that contains this visual box named BPM, signifying the aim to improve...

New tools in Oracle BPM Suite 12c put BPM in the mold of business architecture (BA). This new version contains new BA model types and features that help companies to move out of the IT-based, rather technical view of business processes automation and into strategic process improvement. Thus, these new model types help us to embark on the journey towards enterprise BPM.

This is an interesting step in evolution of enterprise middleware—Oracle is the first vendor of a business process automation engine that moved up from concrete automated processes to strategic views on end-to-end processes, thus crossing the automation/strategic barrier.

BPM Suite 12c introduces cross-departmental business process views. Thereby, it allows us to approach an enterprise modeling exercise through top-down modeling. It has become an end-to-end value chain model that sits on top of processes. It chains separated business processes together into one coherent...

Any game, be it a physical sport, such as football, or a mental sport, such as chess, is defined through a set of common rules. How the game is played will look very different depending on the level of the league it is played in. A Champions League football game is so much more refined than your local team playing at the nearby stadium, not to mention the neighboring kids kicking the ball in the dirt ground.

These kids will show creativity and pleasure in the game, yet the level of sophistication is a completely different ball game in the big stadium. You can marvel at the effort made to ensure that everybody plays their role in a well-trained symbiosis with their peers, all sharing a common set of collaboration rules and patterns. The team spent so many hours training the right combinations, establishing a deep trust. There is no time to discuss the meaning of an order shouted out by the trainer. They have worked on this common understanding...

Game Silo BPM is the workflow or business process automation in organizational departments. It resembles the kids playing soccer on the neighborhood playground. After a few years of experience with automated processes, the maturity rises to resemble your local football team—yes, they play in a stadium, and it is often not elegant.

Game Silo BPM is a tactical game in which work gets done while management deals with reaching departmental goals. New feature requests lead to changed or new applications and the people involved know each other very well over many years under established leadership. Workflows are automated to optimize performance.

Game Enterprise BPM thrives for process excellence at Champions League. It is a strategic game in which higher management and business departments outline the future capability maps and cross-departmental business process models. In this game, players tend to regard the overall organization as a set of more or less efficient...

Oracle BPM Suite 11g provides all the tools and functionalities necessary to automate a departmental workflow. It is not sufficient to model business processes that span departmental barriers and require top-down process hierarchies.

The key components are the following:

Workflows are modeled on a pretty fine level of granularity using the standard BPMN 2.0 version (and later versions). BPMN is both business ready and technically detailed enough to allow model processes to be executed in a process engine. Oracle fittingly expresses the mechanism as what you see is what you execute.

Those workflows typically orchestrate human interaction through human tasks and functionality through SOA services. The next chapter discusses BPMN in greater detail.

In the next sections of this chapter, we will move our head out of the cocoon of the silo, looking higher and higher along the hierarchy of the enterprise until we reach the world of workshops and polished PowerPoint slides in which the strategy of the organization is defined.

Enterprise BPM is a management discipline with a methodology typically found in business architecture (BA) and the respective enterprise architecture (EA) teams. Representatives of higher management and of business departments and EA teams meet management consultants in order to understand the current situation and the desired state of the overall organization.

Therefore, enterprise architects define process maps—a high-level view of the organization's business processes, both for the AS-IS and various TO-BE states. In the next step, they define the desired future state and depict strategies and means to reach it.

Business processes that generate value for the organization typically span several departments. The steps in these end-to-end processes can be mapped to the functional building blocks—the departments.

Figure 2: Cross-departmental business process needs an owner

The goal of Game Enterprise BPM is to manage enterprise business processes, making sure they realize the...

Organizational change in the management structure is a prerequisite for the success of Game Enterprise BPM but is not a sufficient condition. Several business process management books describe the main challenge in enterprise BPM as the still-wide-open business/IT divide. There is still a gap between process understanding and ownership in Game Enterprise BPM and how automated process are modeled and perceived in departmental workflows of Game Silo BPM. Principles, goals, standards, and best practices defined in Game Enterprise BPM do not trickle down into everyday work in Game Silo BPM.

One of the biggest reasons for this divide is the fact that there is no direct link between the models and tools used in top management to depict the business strategy, IT strategy, and business architecture and the high-level value chain and between the process models and the models and artifacts used in enterprise architecture and from there, even software architecture...

With BPM Suite 12c, Oracle is starting to engage in this domain. The approach Oracle took can be summarized as applying the Pareto principle: 80 percent of the needed features for strategic enterprise modeling can be found in just 20 percent of the functionality of those high-end, enterprise-level modeling tools. So, Oracle implemented these 20 percent of business architecture models:

The following figure represents the new features in Oracle BPM Suite 12c in the context of the Game Enterprise BPM methodology:

Figure 4: Oracle BPM Suite 12c new features in the context of the Game Enterprise BPM methodology

The process composer is a business user-friendly web application. From the login page, it guides the user in the spirit of a business architecture methodology.

All the models that we create are part of a "space". On its entry page, the main structure is divided into business architecture models in BA projects, which are described in this chapter, and the BPMN type of business process models in "BPM projects", which are described in the following chapter.

It is a good practice to start with an enterprise map that depicts the business capabilities of our organization. The rationale is that the functions the organization is made of tend to be more stable and less a matter of interpretation and perspective than any business process view.

Enterprise maps can be used to put those value chains and process models into the organizational and application landscape context.

Oracle suggests organizing the business capabilities into three segments. Thus, the default enterprise...

Each element (goal, objective, strategy) within the model can be enriched with business properties, such as actual cost, actual time, proposed cost and proposed time. These properties are part of the impact analysis report that can be generated to analyze the BA project.

Figure 8: Use properties to specify SLAs and other BA characteristics

Within RYLC as an organization, we now depict its departments as organizational units. We can adorn goals to each of the units, which depict its function and the role it plays in the concert of the overall ecosystem. This association of a unit to a goal is expressed via links to goals defined in the strategy model.

These goals will be used for the impact analysis reports that show the impact of changes on the organizational or procedural changes. It is possible to create several organization units as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 9: Define a set of organization units

A value chain model forms the root of a process hierarchy. A value chain consists of one direct line of steps, no gateways, and no exceptions. The modeler in Oracle BPM Suite allows each step in the chain to depict associated business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to measure the organization's performance rather than the details of departmental performance.

The value chain model is a very simple one depicting the flow of the most basic business process steps. Each step is a business process in its own right. On the level of the chain, there is no decision making expressed. This resembles a business process expressed in BPMN that has only direct lines and no gateways.

Figure 10: Creation of a new value chain model called "Rental Request-to-Delivery"

The value chain model type allows the structuring of your business processes into a hierarchy with a value chain forming the topmost level.

Strategy models that can be used to further motivate their KPIs are depicted at the value chain level.

Figure 11: Building the strategy model for the strategy "Become a market leader"

These visual maps leverage existing process documentation and match it with current business trends and existing reference models. These models depict processes and associated organizational aspects encompassing cross-departmental views on higher levels and concrete processes down to level 3. From there, they prioritize distinct processes and decide on one of several modernization strategies—process automation being just one of several!

So, in the proposed methodology in the following diagram, in the Define strategy and performance measures (KPIs), the team down-selects for each business process or even subprocess one or several means to improve process efficiency or transparency.

Typically, these means are defined as "supporting capabilities". These are a technique, a tool, or an approach that...

Within a BA project (strategy and value chain models), there are three different types of KPIs that can be defined:

Additionally, KPIs can be defined on a BPMN process level, which is not covered in this chapter.

KPIs in the value chain step level

The following are the steps to configure the KPIs in the value chain step level:

1. Open the value chain model Rental Request-to-Delivery.

2. Right-click on the Vehicle Reservation & Allocation chain step, and select KPI.

3. Click on the + (plus) sign to create a manual KPI, as illustrated in the next screenshot.

The following image shows the configuration of the KPIs:

Figure 13: Configuring a KPI

Now, Game Enterprise BPM needs to be played everywhere. This implies that Game Silo BPM needs to diminish, meaning it needs to be replaced, gradually, through managed evolution, league by league, aiming for excellence at Champions League.

We can't play Game Enterprise BPM with the same culture of ad hoc, joyful creativity, which we find in Game Silo BPM. We can't just approach our colleague; let's call him Ingo Maier, who we know has drawn the process model for a process we are interested in. We can't just walk over to the other desk to him, asking him about the meaning of an unclear section in the process. That is because in Game Enterprise BPM, Ingo Maier, as a person whom we know as part of our team Silo, does not exist anymore.

We deal with process models, with SOA services, with a language defined somewhere else, in another department. This is what makes it so hard to move up in BPM leagues.

Hiding behind the buzz term "agile" does...