Continuation of the Professional Praxis, you take part in the process specification/flow/engineering stage, by stepping out of the project perspective and assessing how all of the pieces of process (or how you accomplish things) fit together.

In the following continuation of the Professional Praxis, you take part in the process specification/flow/engineering stage, by stepping out of the project perspective and assessing how all of the pieces of process (or how you accomplish things) fit together.

Pat’s status message on the instant messenger reads, “‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson”

Thinking about this, you IM Pat saying, “Hey! Your status message made me think about our project. How do we know if the processes that we use as a software engineers are not a foolish consistency, repeating processes that are ineffective?”

Pat responds, “I agree. We do need to think about that. Now that we have switched to the iterative model, let’s do some process specification/flow/engineering. Process specification, flow, and engineering will help us evaluate and ultimately remedy process issues, improving cost, work flow, and the final product. Here’s a diagram showing how process engineering works:” The diagram is attached below,

You respond, “I’m on it. I’ll specify our process through a diagram. I’ll also reexamine and verify content, format, and outputs of the processes. And, if they don’t match, I’ll make recommendations to make them match. I’ll also figure out which metrics need to be used to assess the overall process.”

To prepare:

Read “Sketching Out BPM” focusing on a method of processspecification/flow/engineering.

Create a process diagram that links all of the processes (from the previous Assignment which is attached below) through their inputs and outputs. Reexamine and verify that the outputs of one process have the appropriate content and format for the next process step. If they do not match, revise them accordingly. Write a 3- to 4-page paper that explains and provides rationale for the changes made to the processes in order to ensure consistency with the inputs and outputs. The paper must also identify and include rationale for the metrics that will be used to assess the overall process. Support your rationale using this unit’s resources and or your own research. Use proper APA format and citation. In the appendix of your paper, insert the process diagram.

Requirements: 3 pages

26

Sketching Out_ _ _ system, you can detach businesslogic from infrastructure to create useful applicationsmore quickly than ever beforeHE BENEFITS CLAIMED BY BPM (BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT) SOFTWAREsound almost too good to be true. Proponents crow about lower app dev costs,shorter time to market, improved compliance enforcement, and new points ofleverage for optimizing business performance.HPM softwiirc (an’l improve anything by itself, of course — but il laii bv a powerful weaponwhen combined with business-oriented documentation and analysis. Within its own controiled.high-level app dev environment, BPM wraps IT solution development within husiness-drivenmodeling and performance measurement.At the [east, iiPM provides aji effective new medium through which the business side can com-municate its requirenients to IT. At best, it can distill functionality from existing applications andfree business logic from the bonds of existing infrastructure to enable unprecedented agility.One persistent problem for potential adopters, however, has been abject confusion. BPM solu-tions come in so many varieties that only a handful of consultants seem to know which solutionis best for the task at hand.Today, clarity is emerging in the form of the BPM suite, an integrated set of tools and runtimecomponents designed to create soihvare analogs ofbusiness processes. Together, these elementsallow customers to model, deploy, and monitor BPM systems without having lo staple togetherbits and pieces of technology from different vendors.Properly utilized, BPM suites account for the fact that tbe internals of elemental process ac-tivities — particularly those implemented by existing business systems — may be difficult toBY BRUCE SILVERILLUSTRATION BY KATE McKEONINFOWOHLD.COM 02.80.0627

The Four Phases of BPMA’ta fii^K level, the’flow for^devglopittg BPM so’tLftlons resembles that of iany otHer”app devcvr.is^. Rut BPlyi’s core features – croDhical modeling, automatf-d aop’ication generation, andion with legacy applieatI. • mucii trrister tin)’Performance management- Dashboards-BAM- AnalyticsAnalyticalprocess model- Rowchart- Resource model-KPIs- Simulation analysisAuto-generated design- Flow- Process data- Skeleton integrationBusinessITEA modeling- Data model- ComponentsCompiete executable design- Detailed integraticn• Data transformantions- Exception handling- Ul designCode reusablecomponents(services)niodity. Instead, BPM suites enablerr to optimize business performanceby changing the process logic thatinterconnects them. Process designin a BPM suite is akin lo a Howchart,annotated with the necessary imple-mentation detail. !t requires littlecode, and the process logic is easilychanged, qualifying BPM as a style ofagile application development.The Basic BPM RowBPM begins with process modeling, abusiness-driven exercise in which cur-rent and proposed process flows aredocumented in detail, linked to quan-tifiable performance metrics, and opti-mized throngh simulation analysis.These optimized models automat-ically generate the skeleton of theIT implementation in a BPM suite’sprocess designer, a graphical devel-opment tool that integrates bimianworkflow, application integration,and business rules to create an exe-cutable process solution. Completedprocess designs are then deployed tothe process engine and other com-ponents of the BPM suite runtime,where they route and track tasks,integrate with external business sys-tems, and enforce business rules.As process instances complete eachactivity, the process engine gener-ates an event to mark theoccasion. Those events arecollected by the BPM suite’sperformance managementcomponent, which aggre-gates tliem into metricsthat measure businessperformance.Performance manage-ment dashboards graphmetrics versus their tar-get values, with drill-downanalytics via OLAP que-ries. They also provide real-time alerts and automatedescalation procedures whenKPIs (key performance in-dicators) go off track, acapability of tlie B/M (busi-ness activity monitoring)component often bundledwith a BPM suite. Actualperformance data can befed back to refine processmodels and he^ixi a newcycle of incremental processimprovement.Process WarsTally all that functionality,and you end up with quite a stack:software for business modeling, sim-ulation analysis, human workflow,application integration, data map-ping, business rules, performanceanalytics. BAM. and Web portals. Allof these originated as independenttools from specialized vendors.But today, within the BPM world,the trend is toward wrapping all thesecomponents inside the BPM suite,whether through mergers and acqui-sitions, OEM, or integration partner-ships. This shift bas created conflictsbetween BPM suite vendors and sup-pliers of modeling tools, BAM, and in-tegration middleware, eacb of wbich28 1 INFOWORLCCOM 02.20.061

Big-vendor solutions that emphasizeBPEL work best for composing Web services intoapps that involve iittle human workflow.tends to describe BPM in its own way.Perhajjs the greatest source of con-fusion, however, has derived from thetwo competing technical architec-tures for BPM. The one that has gottenUie most media attention is based onthe BPEL (Business Process ExecutionLanguage) standard, wbich imple-ments processes by orchestrating Webservices within an SOA environment.This is where the large infrastructurevendors play, including IBM. Micro-soft. Oracle, and SAP.On the other hand, most pure-playBPM suite vendors — such as Fuego,FileNet, Pegasystems, and Sawion —use an architecture tbat evolved fromthe workflow systems of Ibe 1990s, onebetter suited to incorporating humantasks in the process model. In theseofferings, SOA and BPEL play a morelimited role and focus on applicationintegration, rather than describing theend-to-end process.The bottom line is fairly simple. Thebig-vendor solutions that emphasizeBPEL work liest for composing Webservices into applications that involvelittle human workflow — tbat is, with-out multistage bandoffs to various us-ers in various roles in an organization.Pure-piays have long emphasized im-plementation without programming,so their BPM solui ions tend to providethe straightesi line to a practical BPMdeployment. The downside is that, asopposed to their big-vendor competi-tors, pure-plays’ offerings can be moredifficult to integrate into an existingapplication environment.Modeling RealityWhether from a hig vendor or apure-play, modeling tools have onemain purpose: to describe businessprocesses in terms of their elemen-tal activities and tasks, the resourcesrequired to perform each task, andCASE STUDYModeling Employee Background ChecksSTERLING TESTING SYSTEMS NEVER ACTUALLY CALLED THEsolution they came up wkh BPM (business process manage-ment) until after the fact, says Paul Mladineo. vice president ofstrategic deveiopmenr.Bui Mladineo and his team, headed up by CTO MichaelRichardson, certainly understood rhe challenges faced by theirconnpany, which specializes in pre-employment screening andbackground checks. They ultimately chose a BPM system fromFuego for the task,”The data we collect is a commodity, not proprietary,” Mladi-neo says. The task, then, was to differentiate the company’s ser-vices from the competition, which taps the same information.Because the data is publicly available. Mladineo knew thatthe data quality, delivery, and services wrapped around theinformation was how they could achieve this. However. Sterlingfaced one additional challenge: Managing and mapping uniquecustomized services for 4,000 customers was not what Mladineocalled “commercially efficient,”What was needed was a BPM solution that could modelthe sourcing processes and reuse process components whereapplicable — and then employ logical branching in order to ac-commodate a wide variety of clients and services, “Employmentverification for day care centers is quite different than licensingfor driving a tractor trailer,” Mladineo says, and yet the process ofemployment verification itself has some common attributes.The IT goal was to expose meaningful results to clients withmany different formats and kick off alerts, in some cases usingXML messaging, and to do it on a scale that could accommo-date Sterling’s numerous clients,”With this repository of process components, we can build,configure, and test processes, and it doesn’t require hard-coding,” Richardson says.The process started with flowcharting the “as-is” businessprocesses, which gave them the opportunity to automate andreuse pieces of the processes that were similar and then to usebranching to accommodate customization.”It is one thing to do that with a Word document that is sentaround, but another thing entirely to translate that to a logicalinfrastructure running on servers,” Richardson says.The ultimate goal is to cut the amount of time it takes to com-plete a typical piece of work by 25 to 40 percent. Of course, thereis always a disconnect between design and execution,”Using Fuego, we were able to create the connections betweenthe theoretical process and execution by having a common visu-alization tool used by both the technical folks and business folks,”Richardson says.Is it a roaring success? Mladineo says it is still early in pro-duction, and they don’t have a full set of data back, but themere process of modeling the current system has brought tothe surface inefficiencies In the production level, “The rigorrequired to do it with a tool forced a lot of intemal discussion.’— Ephraim Schwartz30INFOWOHbD.COM 02.20.06

What They’re Usingtn 3 January 200G IDC survey, four offerings led ttie pack whenrespondents involved In the acquisition of BPM software were askedwhich solutions were currently in use.IBM WebSphere Process ServerAdobe Workflow or Process ManagerMicrosoft Biztalk ServerBEAWeblogicthe business rules interconnectingthem — all using a graphical notationunderstandable to business users.Models play a critical role in align-ing process design with quantifiableperformance objectives and optimiz-ing expected results through simu-lation analysis. By annotating eachprocess activity with performance-related parameters such as expectedlime to perform, resource costs, avail-ability, and branching ratios at forks inthe flow path, models can be analyzedin a variety of scenarios using a simu-lation engine built hito the modelingtool. In advanced modeling tools, theKPIs that will be used to measure theperformance of the process imple-mentation determine the parametersrequired in the model, ultimately clos-ing the loop of performance improve-ment. This requires models that gobeyond simple descriptions of activ-ity flow to include modeling of organi-zational resources, process data, andprocess performance metrics.For years, these capabilities havebeen the exclusive domain of businessprocess modeling tools from vendorssuch as Casewise. IDS Scheer. Popkin(now Telelogici. and Proforma, oftenas part of a hroader suite of enterprisearchitecture tools. Now. however, ven-dors such as Global 360. IBM, and Sav-ion are implementing the processmodeling fimctions of these toolswithin the BPM suite itself. At the sametime, modeling vendors iu-e improvinginteroperability among BPM suites byleveraging BPMN (business processmodeling no(ation), a staaidardizedgraphical notation from the ObjectManagement Group.STUDYEvaluating Anti-Terror TechnologyBPM EVEN HAS A PLACE IN THE WAR ON TERROR, ACCORD-ing CO Indy Crowley, research staff member and actinglead for IT at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), anorganization chat evaluates technology under the SAFETY(Support Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technolo-gies) Act of 2002.In support of the SAFETY Act, companies submit technolo-gies and services to IDA for evaluation. At any one time, IDAmight be juggling SO different “applications.” as they call theproducts or services. Each application, in turn, may involve asmany as 60 different steps before a final evaluation is made andsent on to Homeland Security.Thechallengewas to know the status of aii applicationsunder evaluation throughout its lifecycle at IDA in order torespond to internal and external inquiries.”Before using Appian. everything was done on spread-sheets and paper,” Crowley says. And it tied up specialistswhose sole job was to track the documents throughoutthe lifecycie.Crowley says the Appian system formalized a series of tasks orprocesses. He created a prototype to model the current process-es, which was used to discover why applications were so hard totrack. Then, as they used Appian, processes were modified.”We took out steps in the process that were there simply totell us it was there,” Crowley says.While the system is in its initial stages and there have beenimprovements, Crowley judged the results “mixed.”OneoflDA’sgoals was to be able to adjust processes fre-quently as needs arose, and to change or retrograde applica-tions that were already under review. The current system doesnot do that easily because Its business processes are complex.long-running, and hard to modify.”We are looking for the next version of the product, whichwill allow us to break the model into small subsectionsso we can go back and change the processes under way,”Crowley says.The product has allowed IDA to use fewer people to trackwhere things are, and applications are not held up for lack ofknowing where they are.”Now, the process is documented. When questions come upabout why it is taking so long, there is a basis to figure out howwe can make changes and where,” Crowley says. — E.S.32INrOWORLD.COM 02.20.06

When asked’ what business process sets their company was automatingwith BPM, a majority of qualified respondents in a January 2006 IDCsurvey identified compliance and customer service.JH.Compliance process sets such asfinancial, manufacturing, etc.Customer sen/Ice call to closeDaily to annual accounting closingsWorkforce management fromrecruitment to retirementOfdef to cashWhere once the output of processmodeling was a business-orientedspecification intended to guide IT inany implementation efforts that mightbe needed, BPM assumes an automat-ed process implementation will beexecuted on the process engine. Mod-eling standards such as BPMN and in-terchange formats such as CIF allowthe output of a modeling tool to he im-ported into a BPM suite’s design tooland a skeleton implementation designto be generated. This skeleton designlacks the implementation detail to beexecutable off the bat. hut it creates abusiness-specified starting point.The Closed-Loop ProbiemEven with standard BPM design lan-guages such as BPEL. each vendor’sprocess design tool is specific to itsown runtime environment. Today,there is no such thing as a portableprocess design I hat can he executedon your choice of process engines— unless, of course, you consider hu-man tasks, business rules, and com-plex data mapping to he “external” tothe business process design.Most BPM suites loday provide aunified design environment that hidesthe complexity of combining humanworkflow, ajjplication integration,business rules, and transaction man-agement within a single executabledesign. The henefits this provides overtreating these process components asindependent entities in the enterprisearchitecture stack are a common datamodel and common state managementover the entire end-to-end process.Like modeling, process design ismostly graphical. The too) providesa palette of activity types from whichthe designer selects, configures, andassembles the process steps. Unlesscustom activities need to be created,process design involves minimalprogramming. Behind the graphicaldesign metaphor, the tool creates anexecutahle process implementationin the BPM suite’s particular processexecution language.In BPM suites based on workflowarchitecture, the language is typi-cally proprietary but compliant witlithe XPDL (XML Process nefinitionLanguage) standard from the Work-flow Management Coalition. Processactivities may be one of several pre-defined implementation types (Webservice, user task, integration activ-ity), each assigned to a resource, suchas a human task role or an integrationadapter. The configuration dialog foreach activity depends on its type.By contrast, BPM suites based onservice orchestration rely on theBPEL langtiage standard. BPEL pro-vides a single activity type — Invoke— to call a Web service, human task,or integration adapter, all of whichmust be implemented a.s a service,with an interface described by WSDL.But Invoke must be addressed to a ser-vice end point — a URI., not a task role.To accommodate human tasks, whatgets invoked by BPEL is not the usertask itself but a task manager service,which handles the workflow details.Another difference is thut wiirkflow-based BPM suites support the notionof a subprocess, a reusable processfragment that shares context data andstate management with the calling par-ent. BPEL provides no such concept. Asubprocess is another BPEL process;data sharing and state synchroniza-tion must be explicitly defined in theprocess logic. To address these real-world limitations, IBM and SAP lastsummer outlined optional extensionsto the BPHL standard, hut the specs arenot yet complete. In the end, regard-less of architecture and coding differ-ences. BPM suites tend to accomplishthe same set of core functions.Roiling Out Process-Driven AppsThe completed process design is thendeployed to the process engine. Aseach instance of the process is trig-gered, the engine routes it through thedefined sequence of activities, inte-grating external applications, routingworkflow tasks to human participants,and managing deadlines and excep-tions throughout the process. In of-ferings from app server vendors suchas IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP, theprocess engine leverages unique capa-hilities of the app ser’er and its associ-ated middleware. Offerings from BPMpure-plays tend to run on the user’schoice of app server platforms.The process engine also reports snap-shots of instance data and state, usually34 1 INFOWOKLD.COM 02.20.06

Each BPM offering is actuallytuned to the requirements of a fairly narrowset of process types or use cases.ill the form of events, for the purposesof performance management. The per-formance managemenl component ofthe BPM suite collects tho.se eventsand uses them to update KPTs andother performance metrics defined inthe modeling phase. Typically, metricsare aggregated in OLAP cubes, whichean be charted and queried by usersin management dashboards. OLAJ’-based performance management pro-vides historical and “near-real-time”repordng and drill-down analytics, asupdates are performed on demand byre-crunchini; the collected data set.Some BPM suites, including those of-fered by Adobe, FileNet. IBM, Intalio,and Sawion. support true BAM. pro-viding real-time update of selectedKPIs with rule-triggered alerts and es-calation actions.Metrics computed from runningprocesses can be used to refine themodel parameters used to generateexpected values of those metrics, mak-ing Ihe effect of process changes morepredictable and stimulating additionalrounds of process improvement.The BPM ChoicePicking the right BPM suite is a realchallenge. Although virtually all thevendors promote the same list of ca-pabilities in their hrochures and Websites, eacb offering is actually tuned tothe requirements of a fairly narrow setof process types or use cases.For example, a BPM suite designedfor transactional. “straight through”processes involving complex appli-cation integration but little humaninteraction might not be tbe bestcboice for collaborative, human-cen-tric processes with minimal integra-tion. Document-centric processes andproduction workflow processes wherepools of users draw tasks from sharedqueues at high speed have their ownunique requirements addressed bysome, but not all. BPM suites.Sucb complications aside. BPM isoffering real return on investmentto users totlay. When presented asan architectural stack, it can soundlike a tangled mess. But the newgeneration of integrated BPM suitesis untangling BPM and providing anew middle ground for business-ITcollahoration. r^Bruce Silver is an independent analystand author of The 2006 BPMS Report,a free download from the BPM Institute(infoworldxoinji87’i).CASE STUDYBuilding a Workflow for Insurance RepsWITH MORE THAN S3 BILLION IN SALES AND MORE THAN 2.3million customers, 100-year-old American National InsuranceCompany (ANIC) has quire a few legacy systems in operation.The greatest challenge for ANIC was around customer ser-vice. “Customers wanted information about the relationshipbetween us and them,” says Gary Kirkham, vice president anddirector of planning and support at ANIC.Although CSRs (customer service reps) went to great lengthsto satisfy a query, it often would mean a handling time of 10 or11 minutes, as reps drilled down into one system for a piece ofthe answer, logged out, and went into the next system.”The reps had to have enough talk that was meaningful whilethey worked between systems.” Kirkham says.ANIC wanted one interface with all che data immediatelyaccessible to the CSRs. When Kirkham started the project inthe ’90s, the process was called “technology-enabled selling.”he recalls, and it was only after Gartner redefined the marketin early 2000 as BPM chat the name came to mean some-thing more.After the processes have been modeled, Pegasystems is usedto log on to all of ANIC’s legacy systems when a request comesfrom a workstation. A transaction is launched and comesback to a clipboard behind thescenesof the workflow. Whena customer call comes in, Pegasystems taps into the variouscustomer files and history and sends the information up to theCSR, “Depending on what the customer asks for. different busi-ness rules are enacted that take the CSR down different paths,”Kirkham says.The original goal was to put the CSR in a position to help thecustomer as quickly as possible. As that improves, ANIC has asecondary goal of optimizing and automating processes.When an insured customer dies, for example, it triggers anentire set of processes that used to be done manually. “OncePegasystems knows an insured has expired, it processes auto-matically all the things three people used to do,” Kirkham says.The results for ANIC have been quite dramatic. Kirkhamcredits the new system with increasing sales in its annuitydivision from $750 million to S2.2 billion two years in a row.It does this by helping ANIC’s 80 independent brokers differ-entiate among callers by which ones produce the most sales,”Through our business rule, we can service one of these cus-tomers usually within 15 seconds.” he says. — £.S,INFOWOHLD.COM 02,20.06 1 35

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