Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The BPMS check list
A BPM system must have a lot of different features to be a good asset for its users. For
each individual stage of the cycle, you should find different tools or projects that you will
need to evaluate before deciding to adopt them.
For the Discovery stage, a BPMS should provide you with a way to gather business know-
ledge. The tools that are most useful for this stage are questionnaire builders, interview re-
cording software, and other means to store and analyze information from interviewees and
other sources to understand how things work in the company. Most of the open source pro-
jects provide a modeling tool without giving us the appropriate information gathering and
analysis tools. This usually confuses new adopters, because they start working without fig-
uring out first what they need to model and solve. You should be aware of this and be pre-
pared to spend some time asking questions and analyzing the results.
The Formalization stage needs tools to model your business processes. The best ones
nowadays should all support the BPMN 2.0 language to write these processes. Most of
these tools are targeted to business analysts whose only technical requirement is under-
standing of the BPMN 2.0 language, so be prepared to provide training for the people in-
volved in writing the processes. During the first iterations, the first processes are usually
defined by people who already know how to write the processes and the implications of
modeling an executable business process, and they can even use that writing time to trans-
mit their knowledge.
Another thing to notice about the quality of a process editor is how it integrates with ex-
ternal configurations and modeling information, such as entity models and specific
business-centric activity descriptions. Make sure that you're able to do those things when
you evaluate a process editor.
The Implementation and Runtime stages are the ones where the most tools are usually
found. They constitute the main component of a BPMS, that is, they provide an execution
environment for your processes. From the software point of view, these two stages are well
covered by the existing open source projects in the market. It's important to understand that
a BPMS should allow the technical people of the company to directly interact with the pro-
cess engine so that they can customize and extend the provided generic behavior. During
these stages, we will see a strong relation of BPM with SOA-based applications. BPM can
become a very important component in relation to web services, as a coordinator, and as a
consumer; it can even be exposed itself as a web service. In
Chapter 10
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Integrating KIE
