What You Should Expect from BPM

• BPM makes it easy for companies to program their current processes, automate their execution, monitor their current performance, and make on-the-fly changes to improve the current processes.
• The process-managed enterprise is the company of the future.
• BPM software enables you to automate those tasks that are currently being performed manually. Many of these tasks require some type of application process, approval or rejection process, notifications, and status reports. A BPM solution can make these processes automatic.
• Exception handling is an area where BPM really shines. Organizations have few problems when their processes run smoothly 99 percent of the time. However, it's the exceptional processes in the 1 percent that dominate the majority of the company's time and resources.
• BPM is excellent for processes that extend beyond the boundaries of an enterprise and communicate with processes of the partners, customers, suppliers, and vendors.

Benefits of an SOA and BPM Framework
An SOA, along with BPM, focuses on internal and cross-enterprise processes, thus helping organizations streamline operations, reduce costs, and increase responsiveness. Specifically, an SOA in conjunction with BPM provides general-purpose, service-based distributed computing capabilities that deliver:

• Faster response rate to changing business requirements
• Operational efficiencies
• Faster, less expensive application integration
• Easier application development and deployment

Responsiveness
Existing enterprise solutions are inadequate in their ability to quickly change processes in response to changing business dynamics. The effort typically requires additional manual code development and results in a system that is difficult to maintain and extend. An SOA and BPM infrastructure strengthens the enterprise by enabling rapid changes to existing processes by dynamically allowing the inclusion of additional services or the modification of existing services. An SOA and BPM framework also includes support for run-time deployment, thereby allowing modified processes to be redeployed instantly.

Efficiency
Most packaged enterprise applications perform well in streamlining processes related to standard tasks. However, the performance rapidly deteriorates while automating and streamlining customized processes that encompass multiple enterprise applications. The process is difficult, time consuming, and expensive to implement and maintain.

The SOA and BPM infrastructure addresses this issue by allowing the definition of any process in any network topology, spanning multiple enterprise boundaries. This is accomplished via a peer-to-peer messaging infrastructure with distributed security mechanisms that allow efficient data exchanges for easy implementation, while enabling each enterprise to enforce its own security policies. This allows an SOA and BPM framework to increase operational efficiency across the entire value chain.

Application Integration
Existing packaged application integration solutions are complex and require significant implementation effort, often including extensive manual coding for deployment purposes. An SOA and BPM infrastructure provides native support for run-time deployment of services across the network and dramatically reduces the overall costs of application integration and deployment by automating these time-consuming processes. It also allows extension of integration across business boundaries.

Application Development and Deployment
In the traditional software development process, translating requirements into working distributed systems is both time consuming and difficult, requiring several stages of manual development and deployment. This complex, error-prone task can be effectively streamlined using a higher-level, component-based SOAIF. The SOAIF incorporates tools that let processes that are developed, using standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), be easily translated into distributed high-level services, which are easier to develop, manipulate, and debug. These services are easily composed into implementation-level data flows without the user or developer having to track complex middleware concepts, such as topics or queues. Further, the implementation-level services can run on any machine across the network by virtue of the built-in dynamic deployment support SOAIF provides. The combination of service-oriented tools and built-in support for distributed debugging, run-time tracing and logging, and dynamic deployment allows the SOAIF to dramatically reduce the time taken to implement and deliver working processes.

Conclusion
The move toward SOAs will affect all distributed computing in the future. SOAs provide a layer of abstraction over all existing architectures, allowing distributed solutions to be built by composing asynchronous services into composite applications over a network.

Deploying an SOA requires software that provides service-oriented management, integration, security, tools, and processes. While these segments are currently served by individual packages and solutions, they'll evolve into a single SOA and BPM infrastructure solution.

An SOA and BPM framework includes all of the distributed computing functionality an organization needs to develop, deploy, manage, and extend an SOA; these frameworks will come to dominate enterprise computing over the next few years.

• Figure 1