Summary

In this chapter, we saw how BPM as an approach to model, automate, and optimize business process is typically applied rather on a departmental level. We saw how BPM Suite 12c introduced new features that allow us to cross the bridge towards the top-down, cross-departmental, enterprise-level BPM. We depicted the key characteristics of the enterprise BPM methodology, which aligns corporate or strategic activities with actual process automation projects.

We learned the importance of modeling standards and guidelines, which should be used to gain business process insight and understanding on broad levels throughout the enterprise. The goal is to establish a shared language to talk about the capabilities and processes of the overall organization and the services it provides to its customers.

The role of data in SOA that will support business processes was understood with a critical success factor being the definition of the business data model that, along with services, will form the connection between the process layer, user interface layer, and the services layer. We understood how important it is to separate application logic from service logic and process logic to ensure the benefits of a process-driven architecture are realized.

In the next chapter, we will get more concrete, showing how to actually design and implement automated business processes that guide people through a chain of steps in BPMN and how to define something more complex, such as a law service, which orchestrates a chain of service calls in BPEL. We will see how implementation details are added to the abstract services as composite applications. In subsequent chapters, we will see further benefits from separating our service architecture into layers and ensuring that presentation services (for use in human task user interfaces and mobile access to the services) and business services (for use in process execution) are built for a purpose and are ready to bring about a change in the life cycle that this usage dictates.