Johannesburg, 04 Aug 2008
The flexibility, integration and business automation that enterprises demand from their Business Process Management (BPM) systems is possible only if the process logic and business logic are kept separate and both are integrated into old and new systems across the enterprise, says Jarno Loubser, director: solutions architecture, Red Man Technologies.
"Effective BPM systems must keep process logic and decision logic apart. Process logic describes the flow of the process and decision logic is about the management policies and principles used across all the processes. Decision logic is implemented as business rules.
"The processes might differ from department to department within a business but, once in place, they rarely change. But the decision logic needs to be dynamic and this is where the rules come in. If a business rule is changed in one process it becomes a major task to update all of them across the business processes - which is necessary to maintain the integrity of the system."
He adds that when business processes are changed, replicated or extended to new environments in response to dynamic business needs, the rules that support how those processes are executed need to be consistent across the enterprise.
To achieve this, rules must be implemented as services and once they are kept separate from the solution, automated business processes become flexible - and can be quickly changed - without jeopardising system integrity. The processes can then work independently of the application, be it ERP, mobile or external.
Loubser stresses that a good BPM solution needs processes and rules to seamlessly integrate with both legacy and new systems. This makes business process automation possible.
"There is tremendous company investment and value in legacy systems that can readily be used with new systems through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This will help business units or applications break out of the silos in which they have operated for years, and become part of a dynamic, integrated enterprise-wide solution."
This integration, he adds, is one of the major challenges facing IT departments today. Legacy systems need not be replaced, as long as they are open to integration, and still offer valuable functionality and are not running up exorbitant maintenance costs.
"Integrating the old with the new makes business automation possible. Without this automation in place real process improvements are unlikely to be experienced, and all you will have is workflow or paper flow.
"By facilitating integration, BPM gives a powerful and dynamic control mechanism to the various components within the enterprise systems. It enables a single source of data capture, minimising input errors, and enabling new and accurate information to be more quickly available throughout the organisation."
It also serves as a viable platform for the virtualisation of the workforce, enabling staff to access enterprise information through a variety of devices - both wired and wireless - irrespective of their geographic location.
But underlying the success of BPM in the enterprise is the value of business rules management (BRM) which is the key to agility of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), of which BPM is the mid-point.
South African ICT operations are starting to explore business rules engines as they are starting to understand their value, Loubser says.
"Services built with BRM are much easier to configure than those written with code, as rules are modelled visually and code is generated automatically. Having a good rules engine that supports visual modelling makes it reasonably straightforward to generate, and re-generate, code and deploy it to the application environment."
He stresses the value of developing self-healing processes that use business rules to create application management and rules testing. This, he says, is preferable to application development and testing.
Having a common rules engine for the core business logic mitigates many of the risks inherent in using two BPM systems - human-to-human and business-to-business systems.
Only the largest South African enterprises are likely to able to buy a single vendor solution for both systems, Loubser says, so most will need to integrate the best-of-breed systems they can afford.
With these technologies reaching larger markets, the prices are becoming more affordable and the products themselves more robust. Today BPM, BRM and SOA are more accessible than ever before, enabling a wider range of companies to be more agile and competitive in their respective markets.
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