Heart of the Web services revolution
During the past few years, BPM (business process management) has quickly become one of the hotter trends in the world of EAI (enterprise application integration). And why not? With BPM, companies can take separate pieces of business logic and organize them into specific sequences to achieve specific goals. These building blocks of business logic can then be reorganized in any number of patterns to customize business objectives, thus eliminating the need to start from scratch.
Financially, BPM simply makes sense. With business processes increasingly distributed and complex, technologies that deliver easy management, extensibility, and process reuse and repurposing are crucial to bolstering the bottom line.
In the early days, technologies such as document flow routing and state management tools drove BPM, and helped the technology find a home in a variety of application-server and integration-broker packages.
But BPM’s potential remains largely untapped. Although the basics for rules processing are in place, much work remains to round out other capabilities, such as improvements in human intervention, exception handling, and cross-platform interoperability. Meanwhile, the demand for continued process innovation is nipping at the heels of BPM vendors.
The good news: For BPM’s backers, the rise of service-oriented architectures (such as Web services) is assuring the technology a place in the enterprise software market well into the next several years.
Because of their componentized design, Web services rely on BPM to lace individual, specialized processes together into a completed fabric of enterprise design and functionality. And as the Web services revolution rolls on, businesses will find BPM’s chief attributes (namely, its support for code functionality resequencing and the close control it provides over work flow) to be a boon in rolling out new capabilities and adapting to partners’ and customers’ requirements.
To reach this goal, enterprises must look to BPM as more than just an afterthought. Rather, the technology must be tightly integrated into the heart of all enterprise systems.
For now, a realistic goal for the BPM industry is to make process management so understandable and accessible that every system developer is familiar with concepts such as rules engines and flow control. During the next 12 months to 24 months, through vendor partnerships and acquisitions, BPM capabilities will become increasingly commoditized in enterprise integration platforms and development tool environments.
In the months ahead, companies should be making IT investments to capitalize on BPM efficiencies. After all, the cultural mind-shift that will be demanded of developers — who eventually will be asked to break their applications into more modular, service-oriented components — will take some getting used to.
Moreover, companies invested in BPM solutions should keep a close watch on vendor activity, looking for trends and standards that can translate into continued competitiveness. After all, BPM — much like the services-oriented world of tomorrow it seeks to facilitate — is still a work in progress.
— James R. Borck
