Business Process Management and Web Services
Author: Vincent Yen
April 2007
by Vincent Yen, Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Raj Soin College of Business
Business Processes Are EverywhereBusiness process management (BPM) is a very popular topic in the world of information technology today. Simply, a business process is a sequence of activities with a well justified business goal; for example, customer services. Many important processes are interactive and repetitive in nature between businesses and customers, e.g., customer orders processing. An improvement in such processes may accumulate significant benefits over time. However, not all business processes (BP) are of same type. For a company like General Motors, it has very efficient production process for producing automobiles. A collaborative process is another type of BP. A characteristic of BP is that it normally traverses through many organizational units, invokes business rules and contains wide range of expertise/knowledge of business. If a company does not possess a specific business process expertise it would be great if such expertise, in whole or in part, could be purchased from the market place. Web Services, discussed later, is a promising technology that is making it possible on the Internet.
Why Should We Be Serious On Business Processes?
The importance of business processes is highlighted by the “re-engineering” era of the nineties. The book “Reengineering the Corporation” by Michael Hammer & James Champy shows that redesigning business processes could lead to dramatic (not minor) increase in performance. Unfortunately, the success of the re-engineering movement in the nineties is limited. Some reasons are due to in-maturation of information technology and ill management of change. However, the basic premises of re-engineering remain sound because businesses and organizations are continuously challenged by more intense levels of competition. Some explicit reasons for re-engineering BPs are: (1) value – every organization is concerned on operating costs and customer satisfaction; improving the efficiency and effectiveness of BPs will increase overall value, (2) dependency – BPs are highly dependent on technologies, information technologies (IT) in particular, (3) opportunities - the fast paced progress in information technology (IT) creates opportunities for business process improvements (e.g., RFID technology), and (4) IT/Business alignment - a competitive business today requires IT to be aligned with core business processes. There are operational reasons warrants for changes as well; for example, a) changes in information requirements and business rules, and b) organizational restructuring, mergers and acquisitions. The concept of re-engineering has been extended to include incremental and continuous changes in business processes.
Business Processes Management and Workflow Management
Business process management is more than just designing “processes”. It also entails process definition, coordination of activities, control, monitoring, exception handling, implementation and change management. A closely related sub-area of BPM is workflow management. According to the Workflow Management Coalition (www.wfmc.org) a workflow is: “The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.“ Over one hundred workflow management software products are listed at www.capterra.com. It is my view that workflow management receives more attention in practice and research to this date.
Web Services and Business Process Management
Beginning around the turn of this century, a new approach to tackle the software integration problem is the XML-based Web Services technology, or simply Web Services (WS). A Web service may be viewed as any pieces of software or application that is accessible by other applications on the Internet (or a network). A great feature of WS is its capability of building new applications by composing them from existing WSs on the Internet. BPs are natural targets for WS applications. However, “standards” are needed to make composition of software components that reside on different parts of network (Internet in particular) work in a heterogeneous environment. Leading standards in Web services composition languages are: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or simply BPEL, www.ibm.com), the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML, www.bpmi.org), and XPDL and Wf-XML initiated by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC, www.wfmc.org). For the ease of design, modeling and implementation, a graphical language: Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has been developed by BPMI (www.bpmi.org), and is convertible to BPML and BPEL4WS for Web Services implementation. These developments will empower BPM professionals in their work effectiveness and performance.
In conclusion, BPM is a complex multi-faceted problem. It is not easy to develop one solution for all types of processes. However, BPM products that are based on Web Services technology are where the great expectations lie. Industry and academia still need to extend current BP modeling capabilities by integrating more features like: organization, roles, resource, events, activities, business rules, and simulation, into one system.
