Optimising business processes

CXO. You are best known as an SOA provider. How is BEA involved in business process management?

SP. That’s a good question. We're definitely better known as an SOA provider, but we’ve always seen BPO and SOA as very complementary. In fact, for several years now we’ve had a number of products in the enterprise integration space that people have used to develop process automation solutions, and what we’ve done recently is expand our product portfolio to include a full BPM suite (called AquaLogic) that contains the additional capabilities people are looking for as they try to implement a fuller complement of BPM solutions.

CXO. And what prompted the move into the BPM space?

SP. When we looked at what our customers were doing in terms of BPM, we felt there were some limitations in the types of products that were already on the market. Previously we’d been providing products that allowed customers to build custom BPM solutions, and we saw there was an opportunity to provide a higher-level set of tools with full lifecycle support for business processes. This would afford the ability to manage and optimise business processes by providing products that allow people to manage, monitor, simulate and update business processes in near-real time.

CXO. Business process management has been enjoying something of a renaissance recently. To what do you attribute this renewed excitement and activity?

SP. There’s two things. The first point is that first-generation products didn’t originally offer enough value to customers. They either offered a pure modelling approach that wasn’t directly connected to the eventual solution adopted by the customer; or they offered a straight integration approach, which gave the ability to build a custom solution but lacked the types of capabilities to provide near real-time visibility into the health and effectiveness of the business process and the ability to make changes to it. This fuelled the move towards second-generation of BPM solutions which integrate modelling, implementation, execution and monitoring capabilities so you can actually affect the end-to-end business process and support a continuous optimisation of it.

The second point is that standards were lacking. It was important to have skills portability in building business process management solutions, and those issues have been addressed over the last few years. BEA has been very active in working to advance BPM standards through participation in industry working groups and has now implemented those into our products.

Of course, another factor that has driven this BPM renaissance has been the surge in popularity of SOA, because the two technologies complement each other very well.

CXO. Why do SOA and BPM work so well together?

SP. SOA is really about providing the IT organisation with greater flexibility and agility to address business needs. BPM is focused on giving the business a competitive edge by providing them with a clear line of sight into how the enterprise systems are actually running and how effectively they’re able to meet their key performance indicators. You use BPM to define how processes are to be run, what metrics you’re interested in, etc., and this allows a businessperson to see the health of the system in near real-time and also make changes. It’s really about having the right tools for both business and IT to more effectively collaborate – and therefore having a more effective business on the whole.

CXO. What advice would you give to companies regarding their choice of BPM software and providers? What pitfalls should be avoided?

SP. We have a standard methodology we use to help businesses assess their maturity in terms of understanding a process-centric approach. We have a standard set of questions we would typically ask – are strategic business processes identified for optimisation? Are you using a process-modelling tool that supports as-is and to-be simulation? Do you have process owners identified in your business? When you start asking these types of questions, you can help people avoid the normal pitfalls.

Many of these pitfalls revolve around the lack of ‘process-owners’, which means there are no decision-makers to identify how the process is currently run and how it should run in the future. Another common pitfall is that many people find it difficult to identify true strategic business processes – those that really impact the bottom line. We also see that many companies don’t have a governance model in place to facilitate how they re-use services or business processes from project to project. These are all common problems that, with a little planning, can all be addressed by the use of a simple methodology to realise better ROI on your BPM solution and, in turn, better ROI on the existing assets you are using within the BPM system.

CXO. As IT and business practices evolve, how is BPM likely to develop over the next few years and what new technologies are in the pipeline to facilitate this? What are you getting excited about?

SP. We’re seeing two major trends. The first is continued advancement in the ability of business processes to drive collaboration across both internal and external teams of people. Many business processes today will involve people from outside the organisation, so there’ll be a continued increase in having business processes directly spawn collaboration communities for people to complete their day-to-day work in a compliant, secure manner. We see a big future for BPM as a structural enabler of better collaboration.

The second area is the growth of more dynamic capabilities within business processes – being able to have more capability to use the information you’re collecting for making adjustments to the business process in near real-time, or in providing improvements for the business process to the process owner. So rather than just providing business activity monitoring, you’re actually evaluating the data and providing suggestions as to how to optimise the business process.