Workflow, business process management, and SOA

Workflow definition: the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which processes, information or tasks are passed from one particle ant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. -The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC ). the automatic process of transferring documents, information, and tasks from one participant to another according to certain rules. -Workflow standard organization

Business Process Management: Adding integration to the above definition. integration with systems, organizations and applications. some analysts and vendors refer to this as business process management (BPM ). that is, add the concept of integration to the preceding workflow definition. Integrate systems, organizational structures, and programs.

Business Process Management (BPM) refers to business process management based on changes in the business environment, IT tools that promote the integration and adjustment of business methods and solutions between people, between people and systems, and between systems. Business Process Management should include "modeling-implementation-monitoring-management" and other processes. All the services and tools required must be known as BPM.

The disadvantage of the current information system development method is that the demand expression is not clear and the efficiency is not high. In this way of thinking, the process is solidified in the system, and enterprises cannot easily and quickly change the business process as the business environment changes, changes in the enterprise environment make it necessary for enterprises to quickly adjust their businesses to respond. Real-time enterprises will use the latest information in an agile manner to actively eliminate the low efficiency of management and execution in their key business processes. The emergence of BPM aims to solve the agility, real-time performance evaluation, and resource integration and optimization problems brought about by real-time changes in enterprise processes, these problems cannot be solved by traditional OA and workflow.

With bpm, You can automate business processes and integrate and measure your business through process analysis and monitoring, quantifiable improvement results can be obtained from the business, organization, and IT perspectives. This effect will become more and more significant as managers analyze and optimize processes through bpm.
A complete BPM system is structured by main elements such as the graphical process design environment, process management and monitoring, BPM engine, user execution environment, and underlying EAI platform that integrates various resources. SOA is an architectural method, while BPM is a set of process coordination management concepts. In general, BPM is based on the Service Oriented Architecture. BPM creates and provides a BPM process across application systems by bundling services of other application systems. It can also combine various simple service workers into new services to modularize the basic elements of BPM management, and can be used cyclically.

1. It operates in a distributed manner.: Most enterprise processes are run by multiple participants. Participants may come from different offices or even different regions to break Department barriers or even cross company boundaries. Therefore, application System support across the Internet environment and security in the network environment must be considered.
2. It can coordinate work and integrate with applications.: Most enterprise processes do not just run a single business function, but are the result of coordination between multiple business functions. Therefore, an application system that originally independently supports the operation of a business, it must also be integrated with other business application systems.
3. It is a dynamic system: Elements in enterprise processes are constantly changing. The work connection mode will change with the environment change, the personnel role playing will change, and the work operation location will change. Therefore, the application module in the BPM environment must evolve into a dynamic system that quickly adapts to changes. It can easily change the behavior pattern by setting or configuring, or even adjusting the running location, to adapt to changes in enterprise processes.
4. It has a wide variety of elements and is complex.: The BPM system contains enterprise logic and rules distributed in various modules, various application modules with different installation and supervision modes, and the series and dependency settings between many modules. Therefore, the software module in the BPM environment needs to be managed by the BPM configuration mechanism. This includes the enabling and disabling of the module, the return on health status, and the system security policy, there should be consistent management methods and technical standards. In this way, the entire complex BPM environment can be put into control without being out of control.
5. It can grow progressively: Enterprises can start from the simplest BPM activities and then perform mature and complex BPM systems. Therefore, the entire system architecture must provide a clear blueprint for progress, allowing enterprises to invest it resources step by step, and gradually improve BPM maturity to run bpm.

The five features of BPM described above are closely related to SOA. The flexible combination of BPM and SOA can make enterprise business processes more efficient and enterprise IT architecture more agile.