business process management soa foundation

8/14/2019 Business Process Management SOA Foundation

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BUs in es s Proces s MAn Ag eMen t on An s oA F oUn DAt ion

Executive SummaryOrganizations seeking to deliver business process management (BPM) on a

service-oriented architecture (SOA) have traditionally been aced with one o two

compromise solutions: a workow approach with limited connectivity or an inte-

gration approach with limited BPM unctionality. This paper describes a unifed

architecture or BPM in an SOA environment rom TIBCO that overcomes these

limitations.

Using this unifed approach results in a process layer and a service layer, each

independent o the other. Changes can be made to processes without aecting

the underlying services and the line-o-business applications with which they

interact. Similarly, changes can be made to the technical underpinnings o the

service without impacting those business processes using the service. This ex-

ible design approach signifcantly increases process agility, isolates the impact o

change and allows the specialized skills o business analysts and IT developers to

be properly harnessed.

The Goal: Independent Process andService LayerAn SOA is an architecture that breaks down key applications and data into

discrete, independent components, or services, that can be executed in ahighly distributed manner. An SOA increases business agility by enabling IT

departments to reuse services that have known scalability and quality o service

characteristics. Such reuse can help reduce time to market as well as develop-

ment costs.

When BPM is deployed on an SOA, these services are used as building blocks

that can be orchestrated via BPM to model complex business processes. In addi-

tion to creating new services, a key design principle o SOA is the ability to wrap

components o existing legacy applications, and then expose those components

as services that can be called by dierent business processes. These reusable

services can also be assembled to orm new composite services and applica-tions. Not only does this reduce time and costs, since it avoids having to build

and test new code, but it also mitigates risk o process ailure since SOA lever-

ages services that have already been proven through production use.


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The elegance o this approach is that business analysts need not concernthemselves with the technical underpinnings o the service. Instead, they can

ocus attention on the business process. When that process requires a service,

they just need to select the correct service and the inputs and outputs between

the process and service. At the same time, augmentations made to the service

by IT developers should not have any impact on existing processes that use

the service. As IT increases the depth and breadth o service assets, business

processes require less and less complex development, and business analysts

gain greater control over the end-to-end process; each group can work in an

independent but collaborative manner to quickly and economically implement

process management. Deploying BPM on an SOA results in a more agile and

efcient enterprise.

While almost everyone would agree that this is how BPM should be imple-

mented on an SOA, delivering on the promise has been elusive to date. Until

now, BPM on an SOA has been delivered as BPM with limited connectivity (by

vendors with a workow background), or as an SOA with limited BPM unc-

tionality (by vendors with an integration background). Each vendor ocuses on

providing robust, easy-to-use unctionality or their market segment and tends to

oversimpliy the requirements or the complementary technology.

Traditional BPM Oerings RequireSubstantial Development EortsBPM vendors with a background in the workow or document-management

world have tended to ocus on process design and managementdefnition,

modeling, simulation, work queue management, user interaces, rules engines,

analytics and process interactions with peopleand have done so in a ashion

that puts the tools and, ultimately, ownership o the process in the hands o the

business analyst. The necessary connectivity to communicate with particular inte-

gration services has been added seemingly as an aterthought, oten via loosely

integrated OEM relationships or basic integration adapters.


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On the other hand, BPM vendors with an enterprise application integration (EAI)

heritage have approached the challenge rom a connectivity perspectivein

other words, how to enable SAP to talk to Siebel and deliver that inormation to

a mainrame application and a data warehouse. These tasks are accomplished

with highly specialized tools that leave the process design up to the developer

rather than the business analyst. A low priority has been placed on any eatures

dealing with human aspects o the process.

The result is two classes o products, each o which goes halway toward solving

the problem but alls short o a complete solution with the associated benefts

R qu i r d f uc t ioa l i t y to dp loy BPMo a SOA :

t r ad i t i oa l approacs p rov id pa r t i a l so l u t i o s

Task

Design o businessprocesseseasy-to-useinterace or businessanalyst

Business rule creationand management

Application UI develop-ment and deployment

tools

Process analytics

Connectivity to applica-tions, technologies andservices

Reliable messaging(execution o businessprocesses)

Integration inrastruc-ture to create and man-age services

Service discovery

End-to-end systemmanagement

BPM-oritdapproac

STRengTh

STRengTh

STRengTh

STRengTh

Weakness

Weakness

Weakness

Weakness

Weakness

eAI-oritdapproac

Weakness

Weakness

STRengTh

Weakness

STRengTh

STRengTh

STRengTh

STRengTh

Weakness


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exibility, adaptability and efciency or both the business and IT. The table onpage 4 lists the unctionality required to successully deploy BPM on an SOA and

shows how well each class o products delivers on that unctionality.

Choosing either o these approaches as the basis o your BPM on an SOA strat-

egy requires a signifcant compromise:

You can embrace the workow view o the world and resign yoursel to the

act that developers will need to do a lot o coding to connect to and orches-

trate systems.

You can adopt the integration view and accept that while a comprehensive

inrastructure and connectivity ramework will exist, analysts will need to com-municate business requirements to developers and rely on them to design,

deploy and support an applicationand do so without the specialized human-

centric capabilities.

TIBCO Delivers the Full Benefts oBPM on an SOA FoundationFrom an architectural point o view, TIBCO believes that to deploy eective

and efcient BPM, the strengths o both the BPM-oriented and EAI-oriented

approaches must be combined and built to operate in an SOA. The ollowing

TIBCO products deliver this unctionality:

TIBCO Staware Process Suite sotware allows organizations to create a

process-centric inrastructure based on their business processes. This suite is

composed o multiple modules, including TIBCO iProcess Modeler sotware

and TIBCO iProcess Engine.

TIBCO BusinessWorks sotware provides an enterprise service bus and integra-

tion backbone that enables Staware Process Suite business processes to connect

with and use data rom potentially hundreds o dierent service providers that can

span the entire enterpriseincluding both Web services and non-Web services.

The combination o Staware Process Suite and BusinessWorks provides a

oundation or a complete BPM solution in an SOA environment, as shown in

Figure 1. The combination is enhanced with products that provide business


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activity monitoring and system monitoring. In order or each o the products

to leverage the strengths o the others, they are integrated at key points. This

unifed architecture provides unparalleled visibility into all the workings o a busi-

ness processrom design through deployment to production. Business analysts

can perorm each o these activities with vastly reduced development resource

requirements and, most importantly, greater control over the business process.

The ollowing sections detail how the integration between Staware Process

Suite, BusinessWorks and other TIBCO monitoring tools improves results

throughout BPM projects.

Leveraging Services to AccelerateProcess DesignMany BPM vendors provide the unctionality required or business analysts to

design complete and eective processes. What has been missing rom this

toolbox is the means to access prebuilt integration services or incorporation

into business processes, acilitating the retrieval, update and synchronization o

inormation rom line-o-business applications.

The integration between Staware Process Suite and BusinessWorks deliv-

ers a solution to this requirement. IT developers, using BusinessWorks as their

SOA platorm, develop a series o coarse-grained integration services such as

Figure 1: The TIBCO BPM solution


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Retrieve Customer Profle, Update Address, Calculate Credit Score or UpdateInventory. Meanwhile, the business analyst, using iProcess Modeler or business

process design, can inspect the registry o available services, choose the correct

one, drop it into the process ow and then map the relevant inputs and outputs,

shown in Figure 2.

With this approach, business analysts need not concern themselves with the

technical underpinnings o the service. They can ocus on the selection o the

correct service and the mapping o data models between process and service.

The iProcess Modeler includes key design-time eatures such as feld valida-

tion between the process and the service to ensure accurate processing o data

types, as well as the ability to test the process and service end-to-end without

having to deploy either one.

Using this approach results in a processes layer and a services layer, each

independent o the other. Changes can be made to processes without aecting

the underlying services and the line-o-business applications with which they

Figure : Repository introspectionacilitates rapid process defnitionand design


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interact. Similarly, changes can be made to the technical underpinnings o theservice without impacting those business processes using the service. This ex-

ible design approach signifcantly increases process agility, isolates the impact o

change and allows the specialized skills o business analysts and IT developers to

be properly harnessed.

BPM on an SOA Enhances ProcessMonitoringOne o the principal benefts o BPM is the ability to monitor and analyze pro-

cesses rom end to endand to do it in real time. The unifed BPM and SOA

architecture, coupled with TIBCOs unique event enabling o business pro-cesses, expands the scope and efcacy o this monitoring.

Both iProcess Engine and BusinessWorks are event-enabled, meaning that

each publishes messages at multiple points throughout a business process. As

jobs progress through a business process, all associated events can be collated,

aggregated and displayed in real time through the business activity monitoring

dashboard o TIBCO BusinessFactor sotware. The events are displayed in the

exact context o the business process, incorporating precise data rom both low-

level integration tasks and high-level human tasks. Because BusinessFactor can

incorporate messages rom multiple sources, including external sources such as

a data warehouse, organizations can get a complete, real-time view o business

processes. TIBCO is alone in providing this all-encompassing real-time process

monitoring capability.

The iProcess Engine publishes Java Message Service (JMS) messages at key

state changes. A message is generated each time an instruction in the iProcess

engine produces an audit trail entrysuch as case started, work item released,

work item overdue, work item reassigned and others. The selection and granu-

larity o each message is confgurable.

At the same time, BusinessWorks publishes JMS messages with inormation

regarding interactions at the inrastructure level. Examples o this type o interac-

tion might include notifcation that a database update succeeded (or ailed) or

that an attempt to connect with a service ailed. Selection o events that trigger

messages is a user-confgurable option.


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Beyond providing the relevant audiencebusiness analyst, developer or systems

architectwith up-to-the-second inormation about a desired process, dash-

boards can also be easily modifed by users. Filters can be applied to display the

particular messages o interest, and both triggers and alerts can be set based

upon predefned or personalized parameters. As a result, the analyst has all the

tools necessary to monitor, correct and change all the activities without requiring

additional resources.

Process Execution and ManagementWhile the eort that goes into creating a reusable service or business process is

signifcant, managing and maintaining them is also a signifcant and long-term task.

Once a business process is designed and tested, it moves into production. In a

production environment, consistent system management o all components and

processes within the BPM and SOA solution is critical to quickly spotting and

correcting problems.

Figure : End-to-end activitymonitoring gives a completeprocess view at all levels


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BUs in es s Proces s MAn Ag eMen t on An s oA F oUn DAt ion 10

TIBCO provides end-to-end sel-correcting system management capabilitiesthat are ully integrated with the execution engines. The oundation o these

management capabilities is TIBCO Hawk sotware, a sophisticated tool or

monitoring and managing distributed applications and systems throughout

an enterprise. Hawk can be used to manage all aspects o the BPM and SOA

deployment, including the ability to start and stop engines on specifc machines,

report diagnostic messages, monitor error logs and issue various automated

alerts. Ultimately, Hawk allows system administrators to proactively manage the

day-to-day operation o their systems inrastructure.

One o Hawks more sophisticated capabilities is its use o rules to automatically

modiy engine confgurations based on predefned thresholds. For example,should the CPU utilization on a particular machine exceed a specifed threshold,

Hawk can automatically start up a copy o the engine on a second machine.

Hawk enables system administrators to monitor application parameters, behav-

ior and loading activities or all nodes in a local- or wide-area network (Figure 4)

Figure : TIBCO Hawk consolecontrols and monitors allTIBCO components rom asingle point


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BUs in es s Proces s MAn Ag eMen t on An s oA F oUn DAt ion 11

and take action when predefned conditions occur. By ully monitoring StawareProcess Suite and iProcess events, Hawk allows operations personnel to keep

abreast o all interactions o any TIBCO component.

About TIBCOTIBCO has more than 15 years o experience in delivering integration sotware

and is a recognized leader in terms o market share and analyst rankings. As

the need or BPM on an SOA was emerging, TIBCO completed the acquisi-

tion o leading BPM vendor Staware and has integrated its best-o-breed BPM

application, Staware Process Suite, with BusinessWorks, BusinessFactor and

Hawk. With this integration, TIBCO customers are able to reap the benefts

o BPM in a SOA: easily introspecting the BusinessWorks service library rom

Staware Process Suite, pulling Staware process components or inclusion into

a BusinessWorks process, readily creating dashboards to monitor all o these in

BusinessFactor, and more.


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Global Headquarters

3303 Hillview Avenue

Palo Alto, CA 94304

Tel: +1 650-846-1000

Toll Free: 1 800-420-8450

Fax: +1 650-846-1005 www.tibco.com

2005, TIBCO Sotware Inc. All rights reserved. TIBCO, TIBCO Sotware, BusinessFactor, BusinessWorks, Hawk, iProcess and Staware Process Suite are the trademarks or registered trademarks o TIBCO

Sotware Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property o their respective owners and are mentioned or

identifcation purposes only. 11/05

FORMOReInFORMATIOn

For inormation on a broad range o topics specifc to SOA and event-driven

architecturesincluding best practices, standards, organizational governance and

relevant technologiesTIBCO invites you to access the SOA Resource Center at

www.tibco.com/sotware/soa/. More inormation on TIBCO products and proes-

sional services can be ound at www.tibco.com.

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