James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/Rules event in Washington DC this week and blogging as I go.

The fourth session was Ken Vollmer on BPM Suites and SOA. Ken started by summarizing the impact of BPMS:

• Capturing of process (and rules etc) as metadata
• Connect physical and digital worlds (by generating/managing code)
• Real-time process monitoring becomes practical (as process is automated and integrated)
• Allows for optimization of processes (through event processing and activity monitoring)

All of which should increase business user control and agility. This is all part of the Digital Business Architecture (about which I have blogged before) that Forrester uses. Business impacts include efficiency, reduced cycle time, better customer service and compliance. IT can reduce maintenance costs, make composite applications quicker and easier to build and drive IT agility also. It is also potentially SOA-friendly.

Ken made a good point that not all BPMS come from the same root - some came from imaging/workflow, some from integration background and, although these are converging, there are still some distinctive groups. Interestingly, I think this emphasizes the value of keeping rules and process separate so that you can use the same decisions/rules across both kinds of BPMS.

Ken showed a graphic emphasizing that automation is the base, rapid development and management of processes build on this and represent current best practice while self-healing and optimizing processes build on this and represent the next stage. Ken talks about Business Event Management (others call this Business Activity Monitoring)as using people to do resolution while Complex Event Processing need not. Very similar set of capabilities in my mind, just a question of who does what afterward. That said, there is more pattern matching and interpretation probably in CEP.

Ken gave a summary of SOA (which I won't repeat as it is pretty standard SOA stuff). He did note that it tends to be slower to build the initial version of an application with SOA but this is largely offset by benefits later in the life cycle. Crossover point happens sometimes from 3 months to a year or so.

He then went on and talked about Enterprise Service Bus products and the relationship with BPMS. Essentially his assertion is that the old Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) vendors have had to drive towards full BPMS as the ESB vendors continue to add capacity. This means you end up with ESBs and Integration-Centric BPMS with lots of ESB functionality.

There was also some discussion about how standards and a service repository are key to integrating SOA with BPMS. He ended up talking about composite applications and how these features (BPMS, rules, SOA etc) can support the development of composite applicaitons. The BPMS essentially hooks up the internal applications (integration) and external service providers to deliver the composite applications.

All in all a bit of a high-level fly-by, not much new.

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