James Taylor's post 'More on keeping decisions and processes separate' has come to my attention with a big surprise. Before I was almost sure that the major points made by James are obvious in BPM, it looks like I was ahead of reality.
If James's notes are news to the BPM experts, I would suggest that BPM is a toy, not a serious thing. Indeed, statements like 'the business person who defines the decision rules may not be the person who defines the process steps' and 'the pace of change might be quite different between the process and the decision' seem to be obvious. They are not true in only one case - when the same person does the process activities and the decisions, and maintains all changes. But such process should be very, very simple due to human limitations keeping multi-dimensional structures with dynamic decision logic in memory (this is why I mentioned toys).
Rules engines allow not only the reuse the separated decision logic but also the utilization of sophisticated rules reflecting industry and corporate policies to be automatically applied in spite of the compliance awareness of the person who creates next business - process decision - rule. I absolutely agree with James on 'At the end of the day the decision logic is not the same as process flow or even process logic.'
Following James' line of logic, let me dig a bit into the notion of 'process'. So, we know now that if we deal with serious business logic in the process decision points, this logic better be separated from the process activities for, at least, two reasons: a) to keep complexity consistent; b) to be flexible in changing this logic when adopting business changes dictated to us but external environment. Talking about the process activities, I can say that, from the process point of view, the implementation of these activities does not matter: the process needs only that the activity provider performs certain business functionality and returns results in the preliminary agreed business form (format).
However, the agreed business form and required functionality relate to the decision making procedure, which is externalized and we noticed before. The trivial question comes by itself: what's left in the 'process' so specific to have special discipline of process management?
Majority of business process activities ( if they really business activities the company cannot live without and not the arbitrary operations performed today and forgotten tomorrow because the business has changes, i.e. they are not temporary business implementations) are defined as business services, business functions of the services, and business features of the functions, or other business sub-processes. Considering that externalised process decision logic may be implemented via other, dedicated services, we are getting a picture where process appears as a set of functional services collaborating under the rules provides by decision-making services (Breaking Stereotype: Collaboration vs. Process).
Thus, where are the processes? Are we getting to the conclusion that business processes and BPM are simply a sub-area of service-oriented eco-system or environment?
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