Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2. BPM Systems' Structure
Business Process Management
(
BPM
) systems are pieces of software created with the
sole purpose of guiding your processes through the BPM cycle. They were originally
monolithic systems in charge of every aspect of a process, where they had to be heavily mi-
grated from visual representations to executable definitions. They've come a long way from
there, but we usually relate them to the same old picture in our heads when a system that
runs all your business processes is mentioned. Nowadays, nothing is further from the truth.
Modern BPM Systems are not monolithic environments; they're coordination agents. If a
task is finished, they will know what to do next. If a decision needs to be made regarding
the next step, they manage it. If a group of tasks can be concurrent, they turn them into par-
allel tasks. If a process's execution is efficient, they will perform the processing 0.1 percent
of the time in the process engine and 99.9 percent of the time on tasks in external systems.
This is because they will have no heavy executions within, only derivations to other sys-
tems. Also, they will be able to do this from nothing but a specific diagram for each pro-
cess and specific connectors to external components.
In order to empower us to do so, they need to provide us with a structure and a set of tools
that we'll start defining to understand how BPM systems' internal mechanisms work, and
specifically, how jBPM6 implements these tools.
