Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The BPM discipline
Now that we have defined what a business process is, we can start understanding how to
manage the way processes interact with our organization. To do so, we will define six dif-
ferent stages that involve business process discovery, modeling, formalizing, execution,
monitoring, and improvement. They constitute an iterative lifecycle for our business pro-
cesses and the way they relate to their context. The following figure shows all the relevant
participants and the cyclic nature of BPM:
BPM cycle and its participants
The BPM discipline's scope and main goal is to improve the current business situation by
planning iterations to solve well-defined problems, and it is not about coding Java or soft-
ware development at all. You may be wondering how BPM achieves such a difficult task
and also how it is related to jBPM6.
After the first three chapters of this topic, the content will be really technical. However, it
will be clearly shown how all these concepts solve real-life situations. We will see that the
jBPM6 project structure, APIs, and designs are backed up by these concepts, and you will
understand the importance of knowing them for future designs.
The following sections describe the stages proposed by the BPM disciplines. These stages
highlight the most important points that need to be understood to start using BPM systems.
