Why Do We Need Business Process Management? - jBPM6 Developer Guide - page 18

BPM stage 3 - implementing your technical assets
In the third stage, the Development team works with the Business Analyst team to add all
the technical details that will allow the process to run.
By now, we have a very important asset already implemented, that is, the business process'
formal representation. This will act as common ground for exchange of ideas, improve-
ment, formalized contract between areas, and also as documentation of what is being done.
For that reason, it is important to keep it safe, versioned, and centralized. For this purpose,
we usually set up a knowledge repository to store them.
Also, at this stage, the process definition needs to be enriched with all the information that
its activities will handle and manipulate to achieve the business goal. There are different
options to achieve this, and we'll discuss them in detail in the following sections.
The business entity model
We will select a model to work with, and our executable entity model will be created based
on discovery stage results.
We usually have an inherited business model from legacy systems. When that's the case,
you have three options:
• The first option is using the inherited model for your process activities. Its pros and
cons are as follows:
◦ Pros : It is fast to implement, especially if the developers of your organiza-
tion already know the model.
◦ Cons : Inherited models could carry an unnecessary complexity for the
process' required level of data. Also, any change needed to be done to the
process' internal model might impact a third-party project.
• The second option is storing external keys for the real entities inside your business
process. The data will remain consistent and updated as long as it can be managed
by a master data source from the process' engine point of view. Its pros and cons
are follows:
◦ Pros : You can reuse your old model and even its persistence, and only
store a key to get the related information when needed.
◦ Cons : If you store a key, you will need to query another data source every
time the information is needed, and depending on the case, you might need
to modify external information (with all the problems regarding permis-