Key Components of BPM

Best-of-breed BPM solutions are designed to address the entire process lifecycle, combining both human and system activities. Based on this principle, we present the key components to evaluate when looking at BPM solutions.

Scalable/Fault Tolerant Architecture

Since many BPM solutions have evolved from desktop document management solutions, only a very few are designed with enterprise scalability in mind. Whether you want your BPM solution to solve a specific need in one department, or would like it implemented as an enterprise standard, you should always take scalability into account. The best solutions will not only scale across multiple nodes, but also survive the failure of nodes when deployed in a cluster.

Graphical Tools

Graphical tools are designed to analyze, model, and define processes. Such development tools (which can include a screen designer and a business rules editor) deliver executable processes that are linked to business rules. These tools also provide an intuitive interface for business and IT users to create, model and optimize processes and monitor the status of active process instances.

Facilitation of Human and Automated Activities

A BPM product selection team should carefully consider a solution's ability to perform fully automated activities. The best solutions will empower invocation of virtually any existing disparate system, business component, Web service or database in the enterprise. The system should also enable both push and pull capabilities for interacting with other enterprise systems. Furthermore, a comprehensive BPM solution should enable human-to-human (H2H), human-to-system (H2S) and system-to-system (S2S) activities.

Dynamic Portal

True enterprise class BPM solutions provide a dynamic front-end portal. This feature not only provides a simple way to deploy a user-facing application, but it also empowers dynamic integration with business applications for live content and context information. A portal also provides insulation from future changes to back-end systems, as it can be pointed to new applications at any time.

Knowledge Base

A knowledge base holds the history and definitions of all processes. The knowledge base should be deployed in a relational database, and an organization should be able to run custom queries against the database tables in real time. Ultimately, the knowledge base provides an audit trail of historical information, which is invaluable to users when meeting service level agreements (SLAs), tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and achieving ongoing process improvement.

Real-time Activity Monitoring

A comprehensive BPM solution should have the ability to continually monitor process activity in real-time. Such capabilities allow for users to instantaneously make changes. Furthermore, the BPM solution should have a visual display so that users can easily see the status of a process. Users can then drill down into the historical information provided in the knowledge base to see who did what, when, and how long it took. Changes can include brute force completion of activities, rerouting the process orchestration, resetting the individual instance and re-sequencing or adding new activities manually or dynamically.

Integration with Existing/Custom Front-End Applications

Many departments or enterprises already have existing front-end applications. In these instances, the BPM system should facilitate invocation of the runtime engine via programmatic API calls and/or Web services calls. The best solutions will expose their entire API set, including everything from process creation to all business functions and monitoring capabilities.

Flexible Platform Support

In today's IT environment, many companies maintain a mix of computing platforms and databases. To help protect this investment, a truly cost-effective BPM system will utilize an organization's existing IT infrastructure. Additionally, companies universally report that when a BPM system is acquired for just one department, the company quickly grasps the value provided by the system, and other departments move to utilize the system as well. So, even if you're looking at a single department procurement, you should consider whether the solution could be leveraged by other departments or at an enterprise level.

Ease of Use and Broad Technical Support

BPM platforms need to support the business with an easy-to-use modeling environment and process integration capabilities. Process integration with existing and new business components are usually assigned to the IT team, who require a different aspect of the BPM platform. However, the BPM platform needs to support both the business analyst view and the technical view. The development, deployment, and management of sophisticated technology often requires extensive training, consulting, and/or IT expertise. If a BPM vendor doesn't have the proper support team in place, you may be left in the dark when it comes to implementation. While a good BPM solution should be easy to use and allow anyone (even those with very limited IT experience) to use the product, you should be able to call your vendor's support team any day, at anytime.