Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1. Why Do We Need Business
Process Management?
We software developers are used to embracing new technologies. Every day, we have to
learn new versions of frameworks to make best use of the features available in them. We
deal with the frustration of learning new APIs, integrating them in our project's architec-
ture, and taking advantage of the all-new functionality that these new components provide
us. We thrive on that. The software industry continuously pushes us into innovating how
we design and architect our software solutions, sometimes to the point of not just creating a
new framework, but a new paradigm to enhance communication and descriptiveness of the
company's internal sequence of activities and software, which we need to understand as de-
velopers.
Business Process Management
(
BPM
) is one of those paradigms whose scope goes fur-
ther from the development arena and into all sorts of company realms. BPM provides visib-
ility about a company's business processes, allowing us to improve and speed them up to
increase profits and reduce costs, consequently improving the way the company works. It is
a discipline with its own objectives, life cycle, and best practices, and one of its biggest ad-
ded values is the common language it defines between all its participants—the business
process.
You will find in this chapter the starting point to define these business processes, and how
they help in building solutions that drive a company in a way that helps it to adapt faster to
the business reality.
We will review this paradigm and how it enriches what we already know about building
solutions, along with the technical topics to put them in practice into the latest jBPM ver-
sion. To do so, we will cover both theoretical topics that would apply to understanding any
Business Process Management System
(
BPMS
) and the technical topics to build highly
adaptable applications using jBPM6. Important concepts and definitions are highlighted
throughout this topic to help you solve new problems as they are found.
When you start embracing these new concepts, you'll find new ways of modeling situ-
ations, finding solutions, and building applications that will be of interest for many differ-
ent people: the development team for integration purposes, the business analysts and man-
agers for formalizing processes, the end users who will interact with the user interface, and
pretty much anyone with an interest in the company processes. It is of great importance that
