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Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 – A Hands-On Tutorial

Learn from the experts – teach yourself Oracle BPM Suite 11g with an accelerated and hands-on learning path brought to you by Oracle BPM Suite Product Management team members

  • Offers an accelerated learning path for the much-anticipated Oracle BPM Suite 11g release
  • Set the stage for your BPM learning experience with a discussion into the evolution of BPM, and a comprehensive overview of the Oracle BPM Suite 11g Product Architecture
  • Discover BPMN 2.0 modeling, simulation, and implementation
  • Understand how Oracle uses standards like Services Component Architecture (SCA) to simplify the process of application development
  • Describes how Oracle has unified services and events into one platform
  • Built around an iterative tutorial, using a real-life scenario to illustrate all the key features
  • Full of illustrations, diagrams, and tips for developing SOA applications faster, with clear step-by-step instructions and practical examples
  • Written by Oracle BPM Suite Product Management team members

 

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BPM yields high business benefits in many dimensions when adopted successfully. Thus it is prudent to be familiar, right from the start, with the essential considerations that lead to a successful BPM adoption, and conversely, the absence of which is likely to lead to failure and frustration. However, before we dive into a discussion on how we should prepare for BPM projects, a couple of clarifications are in order.

First, we should point out that not all processes are business processes. A process, particularly a digital description of a process, is essentially a depiction of a sequence of activities along with applicable flow control and business logic. In digital applications such processes appear in a variety of places. Take for example a “customer information update” activity with cross-departmental scope. This may involve updating multiple back-end IT applications, and the exact update operation may differ from application to application in how much to update and in what format to communicate with the application; there may be conditions under which certain updates may or may not take place, and so on. Often, processes are used to explicitly state all the individual tasks and associated logic behind a complex activity such as this system-wide customer information update. While such a customer information update activity will be recognized as an important and essential process at a business level, its lower level details may be expressed by an information mediation process that may be of little interest to a line of business owner. Thus, the associated process is not a business process. In general, business processes will involve activities with direct relevance to the business and the process itself will typically embody all, or a significant part, of some business value-chain.

Compared to the processes that guide data exchange between applications, business processes also typically engage more roles, often played by human participants, and involve complicated decision making, some of which requires sophisticated articulation of business rules; some others require live actions by the human participants. Depending on the situation, certain tasks in a business process may have to be transferred from one participant to the other. In some cases, a business task may require joint activity of several participants, as in collaboration.

These behind-the-scenes, technical workflow processes that exchange data between applications and perform other integration flows in support of the business tasks are generally referred to as service orchestrations to distinguish them from core business processes.

The second clarification concerns the abbreviation BPM, which is commonly used to imply Business Process Modeling, or Business Process Monitoring, or even Business Performance Management. Here we are referring to the full lifecycle of business processes of which modeling and monitoring are specific parts. Business performance management has a finance focus, and of course, business processes can feed useful information to such financial calculations.

Areas of focus for successful BPM adoption

Successful BPM adoption often involves changes in organizational behavior and focus, acquisition of skills in the necessary technology and tools, and implementation of suitable working practices. These practices range from planning to implementation of business processes, working with process instances, and monitoring and management of such processes, including post-implementation process improvement activities.

Getting Started with BPM

These are areas of focus that are critical for BPM adoption success. Process-centric or process-driven organizations behave differently than others, in that their leaders are strongly committed to business process excellence, and their employees at all levels are better aware how the business conducts itself. Their processing of business transactions has clearer definition, better visibility, and end-to-end traceability. Such organizations make necessary investments in improving their existing processes and creating newer ones faster than their competition. Suitable change in organizational behavior, when warranted, is critical for successful BPM adoption. The implementation of such organizational changes concerns various aspects of organizational development, such as organizational culture, managerial actions and incentive compatibility, and is not strongly tied to a specific BPMS.

Mastering adequate skills in a BPMS suitable for the scope of BPM adoption is critical for efficient and successful delivery of individual projects. BPM practice, that is, the discipline and organized activities that lead to successful BPM projects, combines BPM methodology with proper use of tools and can be seen as one of the ways an organization committed to process excellence conducts itself. This article will focus on some of the practice aspects of a BPM project.

The scope of a BPM project can also vary from company to company. A BPM project may be limited to simply working on a specific process, either creating a new one or improving an existing one. We would call this a tactical project. On the other hand, a BPM project may be the starting point of a broader scoped BPM adoption that is intended to span multiple sub-organizations and is meant to include families of BPM applications. We would call this a strategic initiative. Of course, you may also be dealing with a BPM project that is one of many being executed under a bigger BPM program. Clearly, your preparation will be somewhat different depending on what type of project you are involved in.

Regardless of the scope of your BPM project, an essential step in assuring project success is to identify the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of your project. You need to also ensure that these CSFs are relevant to the key stakeholders of the project, including those who fund the project or own or use the outcome of the project.

Once you know the scope of your BPM adoption, an immediate question is, do you have the right capabilities, both in type and level, to execute the chosen initiative successfully? Oracle’s BPM methodology provides a BPM Capability Maturity Model framework to articulate your BPM capabilities. It groups nearly a hundred individual capabilities into eight capability domains: business and strategy, organization, governance, project process and service portfolios, architecture, information, infrastructure, and operations, administration, and management—the first half of this list focuses more on organizational aspects while latter half is more technology focused.

Oracle’s BPM maturity model also classifies an organization on its level of expertise within each of the capabilities (and thus within each of the capability domains) in one of five maturity levels: Ad-hoc, Opportunistic, Systematic, Managed, and Optimized. The higher the level of maturity, the higher is the ability to execute; conversely, lower levels of maturity identify areas that may require improvement. Target maturity levels for each of the capability domains depend on the scope and goals of a BPM initiative, and any gap between the required and available maturity levels for any of the capabilities, if not remedied, can be a potential source of risk adversely affecting successful execution of the BPM initiative. The following diagram shows capability types and maturity levels per Oracle’s BPM methodology:

Getting Started with BPM

Starting with the right business process

Something that begins in the right way has a better chance of ending well. This is no different in the case of BPM projects. So, what process would you pick as the focus of your BPM project? In other words, what are the important process selection criteria?

Processes can be characterized by the amount of complexity they exhibit in terms of their suitability for explicit representation (as this is needed for digital modeling), number of activities, amount of logic, diversity of process stakeholders, number and spread of the back end application they connect to, and the type and number of human user interfaces the process needs to support. Process complexity can also be interpreted as a cost and/or risk measure. Processes can also be classified on the basis of the business impact they are likely to make—this is a benefit measure. Thus, processes that have low cost or complexity and a high business impact or benefit are easy picks for starting BPM projects and should be assigned the highest priority. Conversely, processes with high complexity and low business impact should be given the lowest priority.

Other possible combinations of process cost and benefit would have intermediate priorities. Of course, this cost-benefit analysis is useful when you have the possibility of choosing one or few processes from a larger set of possible candidate processes. In some cases certain organizational mandates may require you to consider a process which has been prioritized according to more diverse cost-benefit rankings, for example, a process that may be needed for ensuring certain legal compliance.

Once a process is chosen for a BPM project, it is advisable for the program or project managers to assess BPM capability maturity of the teams involved in the project in the context of the requirements of that project. Should significant gaps be found between the as-is and the required capabilities, strategies for timely bridging of such gaps should be included as part of the project plan.

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