November 2002
Three Promises of BPM: Agility, Flexibility, Visibility
by Bruce Silver
Behind every company's brand — the facade it promotes to customers — increasingly stands an extended enterprise, a dynamic value chain of suppliers and business partners interconnected over the Internet. This change is once again focusing CEO attention on business process management (BPM), but with a difference from the workflow and reengineering efforts of the 1990s.
Integration has replaced automation as the critical objective of process improvement. Where workflow once tried to stamp out inefficiency by automating isolated functional bottlenecks, BPM software aims to interconnect the myriad islands of process automation created by that earlier effort and to integrate them with the processes of trading partners. E-business inherently means end-to-end processes that cross functional boundaries spanning the extended enterprise.
In fact, BPM is responding to a new set of business values:
- Agility: The ability to bring new products and services to market more quickly and adapt processes more effectively to changing market demands.
- Flexibility: Accommodating dissimilar application systems and dynamic business exceptions.
- Visibility: providing management insight into process-based performance indicators.
The BPM Formula: Workflow + EAI + B2Bi + J2EE
BPM is more than workflow. It adds conceptual innovations and technology from two previously
distinct software categories — enterprise application integration (EAI) and
business-to-business integration (B2Bi) — and is incrementally reimplementing
everything on a new e-business architecture based on Web application servers and XML.
Workflow technology models and automates "long-running" processes lasting days or months,
including both automated tasks and human interaction. Historically, workflow has tended to
hide integration functions in custom code on client programs (outside the scope of modeling
tools or the workflow engine). This has usually confined deployment to homogeneous system
environments, such as within a department or division.
EAI, in contrast, is based on a less invasive integration style using messaging, allowing
it to span heterogeneous systems throughout the enterprise. The primary function of EAI is
data synchronization. For example, if new customers are added in the CRM system, EAI
automatically adds them to the accounting system. Most packaged applications and databases
generate events when a data element, say a customer address, is added, deleted or updated.
EAI adapters (also called connectors) recognize particular events and publish them via messaging
to an integration broker at the EAI hub. The integration broker then routes application data
via messaging and connectors to other applications "subscribing" to the event, after first
transforming it to match the structure and format of each target application. If prebuilt
adapters exist, the integration can often be modeled using graphical tools with minimal
custom coding.
B2Bi is more than EAI beyond the firewall. It automates and manages collaborative flows
between trading partners via standardized XML message exchanges, such as purchase orders
and their associated acceptance or denial messages. To be reusable with any potential
trading partner, B2Bi allows buyers and sellers to dynamically negotiate trading partner
agreements that specify the communications parameters and terms of agreement governing
the B2B collaboration.
All these BPM component technologies are currently in architectural flux as they adapt
to new standards and capabilities of J2EE application servers. These include the
Java Messaging Service (JMS) for message queuing, the J2EE connection architecture
(J2EE CA) for EAI adapters and the Java transaction architecture (JTA) for transaction
committal and rollback. Thus, one thread of architectural change is making BPM an extended
capability of the app server platform, combining workflow and EAI.
Web services represent another thread of change, enabling discovery and use of business
processes performed by others. Web services will provide new ways to integrate heterogeneous
applications and systems across the value chain, and additions to the Web services standards
stack are being proposed to allow "choreography" of Web services into a business process.
What Makes BPM Different?
While its details are still highly technical, BPM's truly revolutionary value proposition
is that it puts business people (as opposed to programmers) in charge of defining, managing
and optimizing executable, end-to-end business processes.
BPM promises three basics to business executives:
- The Modeling Promise: BPM allows business managers and analysts to control
and optimize business processes by creating process models that actually implement
process execution. Historically, business-oriented models just documented requirements
for developers, and the actual implementation quickly fell out of sync with the model.
- The Integration Promise: Using a standardized framework of messaging-based
adapters, BPM promises to link applications regardless of their underlying platform,
programming language, data model, network location, or immediate availability and provide
transaction support.
- The Management Promise: BPM promises global visibility of running processes
— not only real-time data aggregation and reporting against key performance indicators,
but the ability to use runtime information to dynamically optimize the process, in some
cases on the fly.
Seven Approaches to BPM: A Progress Report
Fulfilling the promises of BPM and their implied requirements
(see "Seven Critical BPM Requirements") is a tall order. No one vendor has
yet succeeded. Nevertheless, the challenge has attracted vendors from a wide variety of
backgrounds: EAI (Tibco, Vitria, webMethods), B2Bi (Sterling Commerce), J2EE app servers
(BEA Systems, IBM), RAD tools (Savvion, Versata), workflow (FileNet, Staffware), as well
as startups building BPM from scratch (Intalio, Fuego). Most of the offerings are new,
and no dominant market leader has emerged.
If you examine brochures and white papers, all these offerings sound more or less the
same. In reality, they differ widely in technical approach, functional capabilities and
fulfillment of the high-level BPM value proposition. The synopses on pages 28 and 29
summarize the findings of a report on BPM compiled by Bruce Silver Associates.
Are We There Yet?
The BPM vendors reviewed on pages 28 and 29 have all succeeded in integrating workflow
with EAI functionality and compatibility with J2EE infrastructure. That by itself is a huge
step forward. All provide model-driven implementation, although not all start with a top-down,
business-oriented model. All provide process monitoring and metrics, although some are far
better than others in transforming IT events and data into high-level business events and
performance indicators. While it's too early to declare victory on BPM's three promises
— modeling, integration and management — these remain the focal points of progress
with each new software release. Thus, BPM is at least addressing the right problems.
However, fundamental questions remain. Is a single process model and runtime engine for
workflow, EAI and B2Bi necessary? Does BPM really belong on the J2EE application server?
Are B2B protocols and Web services standards stable enough to build on? And how strongly
do transaction semantics need to be built into the flow model?
In truth, BPM deployment today is being driven by specific mandates such as HIPAA, T+1
and UCCnet, for which these architectural questions are secondary. Ultimately, the larger
questions will be resolved by the marketplace as BPM becomes a fundamental layer of the
e-business infrastructure.
The good news is that with each new release, BPM software is increasingly hiding technical
complexity, allowing business managers to take greater control of critical customer- and
partner-facing processes, and providing the agility, flexibility and end-to-end process
visibility that e-business demands.
Bruce Silver (brsilver@earthlink.net) is president of Bruce Silver Associates, Aptos, CA. More information about the firm's recent BPM study is available at www.brsilver.com.
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