OMG Business Process Management Portal
Business Process Management (BPM) is a set of techniques for the
continuous, iterative improvement of all the processes involved in running a
business. In recent years BPM techniques have helped reduce errors, reduce
costs and increase productivity at organizations ranging from manufacturing
companies to telecoms providers, insurance companies and government
departments. BPM's successes stem from both more process automation, and
more repeatable, error-free manual processes.
BPM complements other approaches to organizational improvement, and in
particular fits well with the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) software
design philosophy; BPM prompts managers to continuously change and evolve
business processes, while SOA can help software architects create enterprise
systems that adapt to these ever-changing requirements.
While BPM is unashamedly focused on the people within a business and how
they work together, good tools for analyzing, understanding and documenting
business processes are one of the keys to BPM success. Object Management
Group (OMG) maintains several key specifications used in BPM tools. To view
the specifications, visit the OMG specifications catalog:
http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/br_pm_spec_catalog.htm
Further Reading:
- Using BPM and SOA to Achieve the Agile Enterprise
- What is a Business Rule
Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM)
The Business Process Maturity Model describes an evolutionary improvement
path that guides organizations moving from immature, inconsistent processes
to mature, disciplined processes. It provides a reference model for
appraising processes within the enterprise and helping prioritize
improvements to them. BPMM can also be used to assess risks when developing
and deploying new enterprise IT applications supporting business processes.
BPMM is based on Watts Humphrey’s original Process Maturity Framework,
which is also the foundation of the widely respected Capability Maturity
Model for Integration (CMMI) used to help organizations institute repeatable
software engineering processes. Following CMMI's success, as many as 200
different maturity models have appeared. However, most are simply
descriptions of how an organization might look at different stages of
evolution, giving little guidance on the specific steps necessary to move
between maturity levels. By contrast, BPMM provides a detailed roadmap for
business process improvement.
Like all maturity models guided by the Process Maturity Framework, BPMM
is divided into five maturity levels that represent different states through
which an organization is transformed as its processes are improved, evolving
from poorly defined and inconsistent practices (level 1), to repeatable
practices at the workgroup level (level 2), to standard organization-wide
end-to-end business processes (level 3), to statistically-managed and
predictable processes (level 4), and finally to continuous process
innovation and optimization (level 5). Achieving each maturity level also
entails satisfying all the requirements of the lower levels.
Further Reading:
Top
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) &
Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM)
Business Process Modeling Notation is rapidly becoming the de-facto
standard for business processes diagrams. It is intended to be used directly
by the stakeholders who design, manage and realize business processes, but
at the same time be precise enough to allow BPMN diagrams to be translated
into software process components. BPMN has an easy-to-use flowchart-like
notation that's independent of any particular implementation environment.
OMG has now built a new foundation for BPMN – the Business Process
Definition Metamodel. This technical specification provides the bridge
between business-friendly BPMN diagrams and the software tools that automate
and coordinate business processes across organizations. By providing a
common, syntax-independent vocabulary for business process concepts, BPDM
standardizes the way BPMN diagrams are stored and exchanged; a vital
facility for organizations that want to move BPMN diagrams between different
BPM tool suites. BPDM also supports two fundamentally complementary views of
processes – orchestration and choreography. Orchestration is the traditional
view of a process defined as a sequence of activities, whereas choreography
describes the interaction protocols between multiple, independent,
collaborating entities. BPDM's Common Behavior Model supports the exchange
of process information across cooperating organizations, each of which may
have its own process view of the complex choreographies in which it's
participating.
BPDM is built on OMG's Meta-Object Facility (MOF), the common framework
that underpins all OMG modeling specifications. MOF-based tools support
reasoning about and transforming models, so that process definitions
captured using BPMN/BPDM or the other modeling specifications described here
can be maintained in common, standards-based repositories and translated
into the database definitions, software components, test scripts and other
IT artifacts necessary to automate aspects of the business. This unified
approach to creating, storing, translating and directly using models in the
enterprise's activities forms part of OMG's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA),
and is a major benefit of using specifications from OMG's BPM suite.
Further Reading:
Top
Business Motivation Model (BMM)
Most organizations begin using BPM by trying it out on one or two
smaller, well-defined projects. When BPM begins to be used more widely
across an organization, it's useful to represent the relationships between
the business processes being modeled and how they fit into the overall
organization. The Business Motivation Model provides a structure for
documenting, communicating and managing the key elements of the business and
their interrelated purposes in an integrated way. BPM allows the
organization to create MOF-based representations of the internal and
external forces that influence the design of the business, the business's
assessment of those forces (such as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats), the organization’s objectives, the strategies and tactics used to
achieve the objectives, and the relationship of all of these to the business
rules and processes that make the business operate.
Further Reading:
- Link to specification
- Collateral sheet: 101907 BMM Summary v1.pdf
Top
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
(SBVR)
When communicating information within a business, it's vital that all
participants have a shared understanding of the exact meanings of all the
terms being used. OMG's Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
specification provides the means to precisely define business terminology,
formally and unambiguously specifying each definition in terms of other
definitions in the vocabulary. The specification provides a powerful
hierarchical categorization of vocabularies, allowing concepts to be
organized from the general to the specific, and also handles synonyms,
abbreviations, cross-references and multiple vocabularies, so that one set
of meanings can be represented in different languages.
SBVR also supports the definition of governance rules that use the terms
in the businesses vocabulary. Although based on precise logic, SBVR rules
are expressed in natural language to allow them to be easily read and
written by business practitioners. SBVR's MOF modeling foundation supports
tools that allow vocabularies and rules to be mechanically checked for
consistency, detecting undefined terms, inconsistencies and different rule
statements that have overlapping meanings. By providing the tools to store
and manipulate vocabularies, SBVR provides much of the glue that ties
together business models created using other OMG BPM specifications.
Further Reading:
- Link to specification
- Collateral Sheet: 101207 SBVR Biz Rules v2.doc (draft)
- Link to Don Chapin’s SBVR content?
Top
| RSS Feeds |
 |
| |
|
Last updated on
Thursday, March 25, 2010 by
Stephanie
 |
