Open BPM

Business success is about the ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions. Many companies practice active Business Process Management to boost their flexibility. While this significantly enhances business process agility, there is often a delay before processes are implemented in the IT landscape, with tight coupling of workflows and platform-specific IT applications making any modification a major undertaking.

This is one reason why business application software is facing a technological paradigm shift. Service-oriented architectures aim to revolutionize the way software is used in the business world and to boost the benefits. Combined with enterprise architecture documentation methods, the dream of software that supports agile corporate management seems within reach.

Although a SOA-based infrastructure delivers the required flexibility, the wide range of SOA platforms raises the new threat of becoming dependent on proprietary, technology-dependent SOA solutions, thereby eroding the hoped-for benefits.

Open BPM addresses the problem by creating an enterprise-wide, technology-independent BPM repository. This enables business processes to be defined and analyzed in a platform-neutral manner. Only after they have been thoroughly tested are they passed to the IT department for technology-specific implementation, thereby preventing technology platforms from leading to organizational silo solutions. Since a SOA begins and ends with an organization’s business processes, only Open BPM can deliver Open SOA.

EAM
Defines description standards

Corporate IT resources constitute a complex system. An enterprise architecture (EA) describes this system and establishes standards for creating and updating it. Understanding the system requires a number of views—business processes, organizational structure, applications, data, interfaces, and technologies. Multiple perspectives must be taken into account, ranging from the enterprise view at a highly abstract level to detailed views of individual business units, design aspects, and physical systems and devices.

SOA
Consumes EA description standards

Service-oriented architectures overcome the rigid relationship between IT systems and processes by breaking down IT applications into modular, reusable services. These services are orchestrated into technical processes, enabling them to map business workflows in IT systems. When a business process is altered, technical service orchestration is adjusted and executed accordingly.
Reaping the benefits of a SOA requires technology-independent documentation of the business processes to be supported—otherwise, the technical service processes will again lead to silo solutions. This technology-independent approach to BPM is referred to as Open BPM.

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