Oracle BPM Suite 11g: BPM without Barriers White Paper

Oracle BPM Suite 11g: BPM without Barriers

An Oracle White Paper November, 2010



Introduction ......................................................................................... 1 Barriers to BPM ................................................................................... 2 Process Diversity ............................................................................ 2 Collections Instead of Suites ........................................................... 2 Communication Breakdown ............................................................ 3 Enterprise Ready ............................................................................ 3 Oracle BPM Suite 11g ......................................................................... 3 The Future of BPM .......................................................................... 4 The Unified Process Foundation ..................................................... 4 User-centric Design ......................................................................... 5 Social BPM ...................................................................................... 7 BPM and SOA ................................................................................. 8 The Future Delivered: Transformation of the Enterprise ................. 9 Conclusion .......................................................................................... 9


Introduction Business processes are at the heart of business operations. For decades business process management was limited to only the ability to document processes. As the means to document processes technologically improved so did the potential to use technology to manage more aspects of the process. Over the years vendor specialists built tools to simplify a subset of the overall complex process like workflow, or enterprise application integration. Business process management suite software introduced the promise of a comprehensive solution to manage all enterprise processes and to do so with greater efficiency. Solutions offered greater process management capabilities than ever before but fell short of delivering on the promise of a truly integrated and complete business process management suite. Process management success was constrained, as a result, by an artificial set of barriers that resulted in the continuing need for multiple process management products in the enterprise. This added complexity, time, and cost which reduced the effectiveness of this important technology. Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g removes these barriers and simplifies achieving process management success with a complete solution for all types of processes and removes unprecedented complexity from process management by providing a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interaction.

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Barriers to BPM Business processes are by definition dynamic in structure as they manage operational flow in a business that must adapt to changing business conditions. It is challenging to manage these processes without incurring additional complexity. First generation solutions lacking completeness and minimal integration introduced barriers to business process management efficiency. Barriers included the inability to address all process types with one solution, products that add complexity by requiring IT to first integrate the components of the BPM solution, ineffective collaboration capabilities that occur outside of the process context, and performance, scalability, and availability that failed to address enterprise requirements.

Process Diversity There is a natural diversity in the type of processes found in business operations. Processes may predominantly require human interaction, system to system exchange and transformation of information, the generation of documents, or the need to arrive at an important decision. In addition, processes can be characterized as simple or complex and may need to manage a limited or large number of transactions. Some processes, like a sales campaign, are long running and may take weeks, months, or even years while others occur in less than a second. Processes may also be characterized as highly structured with repeatable tasks or unstructured where the flow of the process can only be determined during process execution. The diversity of these processes has traditionally required the enterprise to use multiple process management systems that specialize in managing a subset of these process types. The unintended consequence results in trading process complexity for infrastructure complexity. Efficiency may be improved in some processes but overall efficiency and agility is still challenged due to the limitations or barriers imposed by a point process solution. The ideal process management solution is a platform that is truly complete that it can address all types of processes. This reduces IT complexity inherent in supporting multiple products. It also provides a long term growth path for managing more processes over time increasing overall process management benefits, return on investment, and lower IT and business costs. This solution must also address the needs of both business and IT with tools appropriate to each role.

Collections Instead of Suites The component capabilities of business process management suites have existed separately for many years. Document management practiced in the 1980’s demonstrated the value of workflow and human and process interaction. Business process management suites introduced the innovation of solution completeness with the inclusion of all required process management tools with the implicit promise that tools easily work together. This approach often results in a collection of minimally integrated components instead of an integrated suite. It requires an effort on the part of IT or external professional services to bring together the

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capabilities needed for a particular enterprise process deployment. BPM’s primary benefit is increased efficiency for processes that span multiple systems in the enterprise. Given this goal it makes sense that it is more efficient to start with a process management solution that benefits from a high level of internal integration simplifying the ability to remove complexity, deliver faster time to value, and improve business agility..

Communication Breakdown It is often said that business process management is essentially change management. One of the greatest challenges inherent in both is managing the human and organizational aspect of change. People naturally resist change for a variety of reasons. Successful process management requires cooperation, communication, and collaboration of all key stakeholders in both the business and IT. Effective communication and collaboration within the cross-functional process team provides the foundation for success. Effective collaboration requires process context and trying to find a process notification in an ever lengthening list of emails provides a poor solution. In addition, the last few years has seen the emergence of the importance of social networking and Enterprise 2.0 technology in the corporate environment. It is only natural that these new collaborative communication technologies have a place in bringing the organization together in the management of processes. Communication will benefit from the inclusion of new communication choices while process collaboration will be improved with communication in context.

Enterprise Ready Enterprise software requires enterprise-class capabilities and performance. As discussed earlier some processes require scaling to incredibly large numbers of transactions. Other processes may contain a complexity that requires the utmost in execution efficiency. In addition, like all enterprise software, availability, redundancy, and performance need to be provided for. Without an enterprise grade infrastructure, process management is constrained to singular departmental processes without stringent requirements for availability.

Oracle BPM Suite 11g Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g is the next generation solution to business process management delivering BPM without the barriers inherent in other solutions. Oracle Business Process Management Suite simplifies achieving process management success by delivering a complete solution for all types of processes with a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interaction. This unified, complete, and social solution includes a unified process foundation that simplifies process management with a unified process engine and pre-integration of process subsystems. User-centric design simplifies process modeling and interaction. Social BPM interaction simplifies and extends collaboration providing new ways to communicate and simplify work. This complete business process

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management solution provides all that you need to innovate today and scale from simple to complex processes when you are ready.

Figure 1. Oracle BPM Suite 11g

The Future of BPM Business process management as a software category has experienced and is expected to continue strong growth in the enterprise. Today we are at the cusp of a new generation of process management solutions and Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g is leading the way with a unified, complete and social solution that incorporates the best of proven technology in an architecture designed to address the future requirements of process management.

The Unified Process Foundation Business process management has been shown to consistently simplify and increase efficiency for processes that connect isolated silos of information across the enterprise. It stands to reason that in order to help remove complexity business process management software should itself be unified, simplified, and efficient. Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g delivers the market’s most complete and unified business process management suite. It includes a unified process engine and business catalog, end-to-end management and monitoring, rich integration services, a unified process model, and enterprise grade infrastructure. The unified process engine provides for modular plug-in execution of BPEL, BPMN 2.0, the rules engine, and human workflow with common rules available across all modules. The unified engine delivers the industry’s first native implementation of BPMN 2.0 execution providing all the benefits designed in this latest standard. The business catalog is a common metadata store for both design and run time. It provides a registry of services and objects that can be reused in both BPM Studio and Process Composer. It enables IT to provide a common set of services that embody best practices that can be used by both IT and the business.

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End-to-end management unifies management and monitoring of business processes with the connecting middleware so that problem management does not stop at the process boundary. A problematic process can be inspected through its process state and into any interconnecting web services simplifying diagnostics and problem resolution. Integration services simplify connecting to additional systems and include a variety of adapters for operational systems, integration with UDDI and WSIL repositories, imaging and content management systems, and the ability to integrate metrics from various operational data stores, messaging systems, OLTP systems, and process engines. It also unifies operation with Oracle Fusion Middleware products like Oracle SOA Suite, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Intelligence, Complex Event Processing, Real-Time Decisions, and Oracle security. Enterprise grade process management requires enterprise-class operational performance for both latency and throughput, high availability, and should be enterprise architecture capable. The unified process foundation provides enterprise grade support for both large numbers of processes and users. High availability from clustering and end-to-end high availability along with Oracle RAC assures that processes will always be available.

User-centric Design There are many types of contributors to the process management lifecycle. They include process modelers, developers, approvers, and casual participants in both the business and IT. Each role has specific requirements and each individual their own preferences. Oracle Business Process Management 11g takes a user-centric design approach to participant tools and addresses requirements for the many roles and preferences of users in both IT and the business. It includes BPM Studio for IT and technical business analysts and a web-based Process Composer for the varied roles of process participants in the business. Rich and easy-to-use process analysis and report generation simplifies process status and operational detail reporting. Multichannel development enables simplified integration and reuse of interfaces across Web, portal, and service channels.

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Figure 2. The process management lifecycle

BPM Studio is a JDeveloper-based design environment for IT and the technical side of the business and it incorporates years of best practice modeling design. It provides for role-based access to tools and resources so that the right capabilities are available to each process participant. The model that is designed in BPM Studio is a ‘what you see is what you execute’ (WYSIWYE) model that eliminates synchronization issues between runtime and design time modifications – it is the same model. No translation is necessary to execute the design model. This innovation provides additional value by enabling the new Process Composer web-based tool to operate on the same, single model. With nothing to deploy on users desktops, Process Composer enables a wide range of business participation with role-based privileges on resources and functions much like BPM Studio. BPM Studio, Process Composer, and the WYSIWYE model combine to provide process design tools for the enterprise at an unprecedented level of simplicity.

Figure 3. BPM Studio and Process Composer

Process analysis and reporting provides critical business visibility. Business users require a wide variety of reports and the flexibility to tailor reports to changing requirements. User centric design has been applied to report generation in this release to provide a new easy-to-use, rich, visual report editor.

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Impact, gap, and redundancy reports provide visualization of process efficiency and new simulation reports help visualize potential process scenarios. Process audits, in both tabular and graphical views, show in detail the time taken at each step in a complex multi-step process flow. Multichannel development is enabled by the unification of the JDeveloper development environment that is used for BPM Studio is also used for development of Web applications, portals, and all other Fusion Middleware development providing simplified support for delivery of process information through multiple channels.

Social BPM Social BPM provides process lifecycle participants in the business and IT with expanded tools for simplifying communication and collaboration. It provides process spaces, a user workspace, enterprise 2.0 services, business process guides, and unstructured processes. Process Spaces use Oracle WebCenter group spaces technology to provide three types of collaboration communities that provide process teams with easy-to-use tailored information communities that are in the context of the business process or processes: •

All processes space – for collaboration, interacting with tasks, and viewing dashboards on all running processes.

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Specific instance space – for collaborating on a single instance of a process. For example long running processes like a sales cycle.

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Modeling space – for collaborating on the design of the model. Includes the ability to launch process composer from the space.

Figure 3. Process Instance Space

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A simplified user workspace is also provided in addition to process spaces as a simpler, streamlined alternative for process participant access. Effective communication is a key factor in achieving business process management success. Communication technology has evolved quickly with the widespread use of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 technology. Oracle BPM Suite 11g leverages Oracle WebCenter Suite which makes this technology enterprise grade. Oracle BPM Suite incorporates it in context within the business process lifecycle. Enterprise 2.0 services for wikis, blogs, mashups, and presence provide additional channels of communication and collaboration. Social BPM also includes business process guides that simplify understanding and communicating process flow and status with a milestone based view for participants in the business. Business users have a better understanding of process status when it is provided in the context of milestones that they recognize rather than within the complexity of a process diagram. Unstructured processes comprise a large number of typical enterprise processes and require greater flexibility during process execution. This often means that a process must be redirected in an unanticipated way midstream in the process. Unstructured process support in Oracle BPM Suite 11g enables adding participants at any point in the task routing flow and enables reassignment, rerouting, and delegation of tasks. For example, in the middle of a requisition process you might want to add a new domain expert for an additional unanticipated review.

BPM and SOA Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g is often used to directly connect to the systems it manages. It can also be connected to a services based environment where services instead connect to the systems to be managed. Why might you want to do this? Business process management optimizes business processes and achieves insight into operating procedures and work processes to control quality, increase efficiency and drive continuous improvement. The goal of a BPM initiative is specified in business terms and these results can be measured directly by the resulting BPM solution. In essence, BPM provides business with greater efficiency, visibility, and agility. Services-Oriented Architecture organizes IT infrastructure to achieve greater efficiency through reuse, and better agility with the use of services. It is a response to proliferation in systems, technologies, communication protocols, databases and data models. SOA hides this complexity behind a set of business services and provides an infrastructure that standardizes how these services communicate and how they are managed. The result is that IT can respond faster and build new solutions for the business faster and cheaper. A transformation to SOA predominantly benefits IT. BPM and SOA when combined work together to synergistically improve both business and IT efficiency and agility providing higher order benefits. In addition, the unification of Oracle BPM Suite 11g with Oracle SOA Suite 11g delivers unprecedented simplicity and efficiency in a SOA environment.

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The Future Delivered: Transformation of the Enterprise The new level of complete, unified, and social process management provided by Oracle BPM Suite 11g provides a foundational infrastructure for the future of enterprise business process. With product barriers to BPM removed it is now possible to manage more processes in the enterprise than ever before. Tactical initiatives can more easily be addressed with process management because results are available faster with a unified product. Given the expanding efficiency, visibility, and agility that this platform enables it is truly possible to transform the enterprise to increase competitive advantage through increased customer value enabled by innovation and agility.

Conclusion The next generation of business process management is here. The constraints have been removed providing BPM without barriers. Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g simplifies achieving process management success by delivering a unified and complete solution for all types of processes. The enterprise grade unified process foundation enables the process performance and availability that is required for mission critical deployments. An expanding range of users are empowered by user centric design that tailors tools to match user’s needs and preferences. Communication and collaboration effectiveness is increased by social BPM which adds the process context and tailored process collaboration spaces that can employ Enterprise 2.0 richness.

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Oracle BPM Suite 11g: BPM without Barriers November 2010 Author: Dan Tortorici

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