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Building and Managing Automated Business Processes
Business processes are comprised of the
operating procedures, institutional working knowledge, and information
resources within an organization. In an efficient environment any of these
functional components can be readily identified, adapted and deployed to
address dynamic requirements. This is the implied concept of business
agility; it is an organization’s systemic ability to fluidly marshal and
reconfigure resources in response to business opportunities and
necessities. It is also a fact that a business process is a set of
contingent and ordered activities whose execution results in a predictable
and repeatable outcome in order to satisfy defined objectives in a timely
manner. Business Process Management (BPM) tools, are designed to facilitate
the creation and execution of highly transparent and modular process-oriented
workflow that also conform to the rigorous operational performance
standards that IT organizations are accustomed to.
Automated Business
Processes developed and executed within such an environment are
characterized by the following attributes:
§ End-to-end
visibility of activities, components and functions
§ Process components
and functionality that are exposed and self-describing
§ The ability to
integrate disparate information source and application functionality into a
process
§ Information flow
and event notification that is automated and monitored throughout a process
§ Workflow
participation that is leveraged by the capabilities of desktop productivity
and communication tools
§ Service level
agreements that can be specified, monitored and enforced
§ Process activities
or component can be added, removed or re-configured without disrupting the
process
§ Processes can be
monitored in real-time or near real time
§ Process designs
can accommodate any exception handling requirement
§ Processes can be
easily replicated, extended and scaled
Microsoft InfoPath, an XML based form
tool designed to propagate automated workflow capabilities throughout an
organization. InfoPath was designed to allow workflow participants who
originate information or provide an analytical or gathering function to
generate, interact and exchange structured information. Typically these
activities are paper bound or use a digital representation of paper. A form
created in a word processing or spreadsheet program can be filled out
easily enough, but the information that is entered in the form is not
understood or capable of being processed without programmatic or manual
intervention. Generating, conveying, extracting, manipulating, and
re-organizing unstructured information in and from these formats is
extremely labor intensive, highly inefficient and costly.
InfoPath effectively addresses this
problem by creating smart forms that in turn generate structured XML
information including processing instruction metadata. Underlying an
InfoPath form is a template that incorporates one or more XML schemas, XSLT
style sheets, embedded controls and business logic instruction sets.
The
template controls the behavior of a form in the following ways:
·
It can generate multiple form views of the same
information
·
It constrains the data types and values that can be
entered in a form
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It defines and controls the contingencies and
dependencies for entering information
·
It generates automatic, derived and computed values
·
It can invoke events, prompts, and instructions based
on contingencies and dependencies
·
It provides access to remote information sources
·
It enables the incorporation of digital signatures
Roles
of Business Analyst and Developer
Automating business processes is a
collaborative activity that takes place between line of business
professionals and programmers. Because each discipline has its own language
and development issues there is always a communication and procedural
divide between their respective perceptions of the development objectives.
Consequently, software development is characterized by recursive revision
cycles and ambiguity due to a methodology that requires interpreting and
translating the intent of a specification into a highly abstract form.
While development notation systems such as UML have allowed business
analysts to document the functional specifications and “use cases” of a
process using a structured methodology, programmers still had to interpret
this documentation and translate its intent into a completely different
language and format. Interpreting and translating the specifications of
complex processes into procedural code is also problematic due to the fact
that the behavior of the code is typically more complicated and
unpredictable than the actual process behavior being modeled.
In order to take advantage of a business
process paradigm that is exposed, loosely coupled and document driven;
development tools and methodologies that incorporate these concepts are
required. In creating these tools Microsoft offers an alternative methodology
for developing process-oriented applications that effectively eliminates
the inefficient interpretation and translation cycles that presently
characterize application development.
Business Process
to Support Service Oriented Architecture
We are entering into an era of computing
that will be characterized by the detachment of information from
applications leading to a widely distributed Service Oriented Architecture.
The meaning, function, relationships and presentation of information will
be self-describing; embedded in the information itself using schema
vocabularies and style sheet references.
Information will be generated and published without knowledge of how
it will be consumed or used. Applications will be simultaneously capable of
consuming information and the methods of other applications, as well as
being consumed themselves. Processes will be self-configurable and self
modifying based on event level interactions between rule sets and
information. Entirely new applications, new business models and new ways in
which information will define our experience of the world will evolve from
this paradigm.
Business processes are driven by business
rules and the greater majority of lifecycle modifications to business
process applications pertain to the business rules (as opposed to
technology related modifications). However because business rules in
conventional applications are embodied in opaque programming code, they
cannot be accessed or modified easily and without potential disruption to
running processes.
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It
has long been recognized that the isolation of business rules entirely
from procedural code or any process implementation mechanisms would have
a dramatic effect on the ability of businesses to compete effectively by
facilitating the efficient and timely modulation of the variables and
factors that either drive, or need to respond to business conditions.
Speaking
the Language
The J4 development team has a
broad background in creating tools to make your company processes more
efficient. These include departmental collaboration tools that streamline
business processes and improve operational efficiency, stand-alone
applications, database programming, and custom web and Windows-based
applications. Often J4 Systems is able to extend or recreate legacy
applications that are no longer supported to a multi-user environment or
fully Web-based system. The solutions that we offer are modular and well
documented. We also offer user friendly training in order to assure a
smooth transition. Contact us to schedule a complimentary consultation to
discuss your Business Process needs.
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