Datasheet

BPM is commonly broken down into discrete phases that take an organization from one level of matu-

rity to the next. You can find many different descriptions of what these phases are by searching online.

However, the following phases are generally represented in one form or another:

1. Design

2. Execution/deployment

3. Management/monitoring

4. Optimization

During the design phase, an organization takes a good hard look at the processes that support the busi-

ness. Emphasis is placed on fully understanding individual processes and the steps they entail. This

might sound fairly obvious, but to fully understand a process and determine where there may be effi-

ciency gains, this phase is crucial. The output of this phase is typically documentation that details the

design discoveries.

Typically, the next phase in the BPM lifecycle is to implement the processes that were documented in the

design phase. This happens by either making personnel behavior modifications or by implementing or

updating technical solutions. There are commercial products available to assist in this phase of the BPM

lifecycle from vendors such as Microsoft and TIBCO. These systems are specifically geared toward the

problem domain of process development, execution, and management.

Process monitoring describes the step in the lifecycle in which processes are tracked and examined

during normal day-to-day operations. For example, the business may be interested to know how many

orders are currently in the shipping stage of an order fulfillment process. This is a very important quality

of a BPM implementation because if you cannot monitor what is going on with business processes, the

metrics that the processes generate cannot help an organization learn and improve.

Monitoring is crucial for the last phase: optimization. Monitoring, when implemented effectively, can

help expose issues in processes that were not identified during the design and deployment phases. As

you might imagine, these phases are not performed just once— this is an iterative cycle of refinement

and improvement.

Of course, for an organization to consider implementing BPM, there have to be some benefits to doing

so. If a company better understands its processes and process components, the most obvious advantage

is a decline in errors related to performing processes throughout the organization. In addition, because

processes implemented through the BPM lifecycle produce valuable business metrics, it is much easier

to monitor this information with reports, alerts, and other types of human-consumable data. Better yet,

this data can be made available in real time so that adjustments to the process can occur much quicker

than in the past, saving precious time and money. Overall, BPM can provide organizations with a larger

degree of understanding of its processes while lending itself to better decision making and a higher

degree of agility.

Workflow Tenets

According to Microsoft, there are four major tenets that architects and developers can use when consider-

ing workflow-based applications. Furthermore, a workflow platform, which can be defined as a software

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Workflow and Windows Workflow Foundation

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