Introduction

Whether you are the business owner, a chief officer, or an enterprise or system architect, you each need to address a fundamental challenge – how to make a company more competitive? One way is to streamline its critical business processes by automating their management, eliminating work which does not add value, integrating existing applications around the business needs and evolving information systems in an architected and coordinated manner.

The difficulty is how to implement these ideas within existing disparate and complex IT systems, within the day-to-day operations, via small and evolutionary projects, and by targeting the whole company and its partners.

There are three main sources of this challenge.

• The first is that enterprise IT systems are typically old-fashioned environments based on yesterday’s needs; they are not well adapted to (or adaptable for) the needs of the modern quickly-changing world.
• The second is that enterprise business process management (BPM) systems are usually the result of evolution of the parts rather than of the whole, and are therefore often complex, chaotic and inefficient.
• The third is the current speed of evolution of IT systems, which often constitutes a major obstacle for the advancement of business.

With all this complexity, it is not obvious how and where to start significant improvements such as modernisation of enterprise systems, simplification of business processes and unification of the IT environment. It is necessary to be pragmatic and to use technology to solve prob­lems expediently; not to play architecture astronaut, building technology for technology's sake.

We approach this complex challenge by using an architectural framework for improving BPM systems. The architectural framework combines the business and IT aspects to provide a coherent approach for the implementation of the enterprise’s systems development. Our goal is to build a city in accordance with a city master plan, and not just to add a few buildings. The framework uses a systemic approach for constructing this “city” in such a way that it is highly adap­table for practically all organisational aspects: policies; priorities; existing data; IT systems; business processes; differing sizes of the problems to be addressed; available budgets; culture; etc.

This framework is not about how to make your products better, different and more attractive for the market place – this is for you to decide. What we offer is to help you reduce the overheads in doing so – your flexible BPM system will become an enabler for your business innovations.

The main obstacle to overcome is the existing gap between the business needs and the IT needs. It is rooted in the current duality that exists between the two: the business needs an approximate qualitative description, whereas an IT implementation needs an exact quantitative description. These two descriptions do not have a perfect fit, are often prone to “translation” errors and evolve at different speeds.

In our approach, to eliminate the gap, these two descriptions are considered to be just different views, with different levels of detail, of the same thing. So, the solution lies in the architecting, designing, and engineering of business processes in such a way that they are at the same time a management model for the business and an implementation for the IT. In this case they will be easy to validate and easy to evolve.

This book comprises four parts. Each part is aimed at a slightly different audience and we anticipate that each part can be read separately, although we hope that reading a particular part will stimulate the reader to read also other parts for better understanding.

The first part (chapters 1 and 2) introduces our architectural framework – the issues addressed by it, its operational and multi-layer models and the results achieved using it. This part covers mainly “political” issues which are normally discussed amongst the management and decision-making people, and it is a prerequisite for the other parts of the book.

The second part (chapters 3 to 5) covers the architecting of different aspects of BPM systems – these different aspects are required to understand a particular situation at a particular client and then to adapt the architectural framework to a particular case. This part is designed for people who will themselves architect BPM systems as the chief architect, and who may be an enterprise architect or enterprise solutions architect. In our vision, these people should be able to talk comfortably with both the business and the IT people. The commonest challenge in both cases is the ability to understand many specific details and to explain to different people how a BPM system will address these details.

The third part (chapters 6 to 9) addresses mainly business process modeling issues, including a set of guidelines for developing implementable business processes by modeling them as executable processes. We use the Intalio BPM suite www.intalio.com to illustrate and implement business processes. This part is designed for people who are business process architects and business process engineers (we consider these roles to be the natural evolution of the traditional business analyst role towards BPM).

The fourth part (chapters 10 to 12) addresses mainly technical issues, including recommendations on how to implement BPM systems which are easy to evolve. This is one of the most important but least visible features of this architectural framework – ensuring flexibility of delivered BPM systems. This part is designed for enterprise architects, enterprise solutions architects and system architects.

As this book is aimed at people carrying out different roles in the business it may be perceived as a collection of recommendations between which the connections are not easy to understand.

In some senses this is true as the subject matter is not only complex but covers a range of disciplines which until now have not been collected together under a single approach. But do not be put off. In the same way that an inexperienced chess player may learn by watching a complex chess game, you will hopefully learn (and increase your rating!) by reading this book.

This book is the result of about ten years of work of the author in different businesses. Almost everything in this book is the result of work and discussions with many different people. For this reason, the author frequently uses “we” in the recommendations to acknowledge the contribution of his former colleagues.