1.6. Summary The main points of this chapter include the following: A business process is the step-by-step algorithm to achieve a business objective. The best visualization of a business process is a flowchart. A process can actually be executed by a process engine, provided its logic is defined precisely and unambiguously. When a process definition is input to an engine, the engine can run instances of the process. The steps of the process are called activities. Business process modeling (BPM) is the study of the design and execution of processes. BPM is concerned only with process-oriented applications. Not all enterprise applications qualify. The process-oriented acid test of an application is whether it is long-lived and defined at a given time by its state. The example travel agency application passes the test because of it manages itinerary state. OLTP applications, such as ATMs, fail because they lack longevity and state. BPM, because of various competing standards (BPEL4WS, BPML, and BPMN; WSCI, WfMC specifications), vendors (IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Staffware, See Beyond, Vitria, and others), and even computer science underpinnings (pi-calculus, Petri nets), is a maze that confounds many onlookers. This book attempts to discover, through the confusion, an elegant, process-oriented application architecture. Among the benefits of BPM are the formalization of current processes and the occasion for reengineering, greater efficiency, increased productivity and decreased head count, the ability to add people to a process to resolve hard problems, and the traceability of compliance processes. Some BPM backers dismiss workflow as an older set of ideas and technologies based on document imaging and departmental manual processing. BPM, by contrast, is about web service-powered processes that communicate with processes in other companies and are wired for EAI. The argument is unsound because it makes a straw man of workflow, but nonetheless the reasoning provides an accurate history of the field.
|
