Global Business Process Management (BPM) as a Service Market 2015-2019

Global Business Process Management (BPM) as a Service Market 2015-2019

Top 3 vendors in smart/intelligent BPM space. (81/285 technotes for 2015)

Changing Market - iBPMs include social, analytics and cloud in their offering

For different factors for iBPMs are

• Composition of intelligent, process-centric applications
• Continuous process improvement (CPI)
• Business transformation
• Digitalized process

Appian

• what is happening right now within their organization, markets and customers, and accelerate the translation of that awareness into action and business outcomes 
• social centricity 

Short Comings

• does not have full CEP(Complex Event Processing) and analytics capabilities 
  
• 
  
  less support for top down transformation.

Pega System

• Largest pure play vendor
  
• can be leveraged for large complex business scenarios
• 
  
  advanced operational decision management capabilities, predictive analytics and IoT integration

Short Comings

• did not focus on low end mid market
  
• finding resource is difficult

IBM BPM

• Steadily moving to cloud
  
• enabling mobile, social, cloud and big data while driving efficiency and optimization into end-to-end processes.
  
  
• starting to handle -  more-agile, lightweight projects.
  
  
• leader in decision management 

Short Comings

• relatively hard to configure and deploy
  
• customer feedback is lukewarm / tepid.

References:

http://bit.ly/1R6rXk4

Benefits of using IBM Business Process Manager Advanced. (80/285 technotes for 2015)

Connectivity

RecProcess Integration Challenges:

1. Variety of different types of messaging - over TCP/IP and SNA etc, propriety data formats, unusual and one off integration mechanism.
   
2. Long running Business processes and handling failure scenarios 
3. Undoing Business processes in a controlled manner.
4. Data mapping is complex
5. Inbound event based Business processes.

• In particular, an automated recovery method allows you to bypass the manual interventions that would have been used
  

Key Concepts for IBM BPM 7.5? (74/285 technotes for 2015)

Process Application - 

• is a packaging and deployment construct
  
• container - which has all the models, data definitions, service models, rules and supporting files to edit and run
  
• can contain 1 or more BPD
• can have dependencies on Toolkits
• acronym must be unique

Toolkit - 

• is a way to manage reusable assets
  
• is a collection of BPM library items that can be shared across multiple projects in IBM Process Designer
• contain - all of the same Library Items as Process Application
• process Application which has dependency with Toolkit - can use all the elements of the toolkit
• can only be edited - by users with the write/admin privileges. It is available as Read-Only in the Process Application
• Process Application can upgrade to the newer version of the toolkit and revert back very easily.

Snapshots & Tracks - are part of the version management infrastructure.

Participant Groups - are how you manage who can work with different parts of the business

Security Groups - are how you manage who can create/edit and deploy Business Processes during deployment.

Scripting/Programming Language - Javascript is used to define logic and manipulate data

Advance Editor - complex Javascript

Programming Model in IBM BPM - Clear seperation

• Model or the Flow
• Implementation

IBM BPM Design Patterns for Performance. (73/285 technotes for 2015)

BPM - performance

• Use high performance disk subsystems
  
• Use most current BPManager and BPMonitor reelase
• Appropriate JVM Heap Size for optimal throughput and response time
• Tune your DB for optimal performance
• Disable tracing and logging
• Configure thread pools to ensure sufficient concerrency
• Use fast, high bandwidth network connections
• For Business Processes - that use 
• BPMN - 
• tune the bpd-queue-capacity & max thread pool size - optimal throuput and scalling
• remove unnecessary snapshots from Process Center
• disable notifications is they are not required
• define auth alias, when using CEI to emit events
• tune cache parameters
• tune participant groups
• optimize data search operations
• tune Event Manager - tune BPD pool size, and worker thread pool size.
• tune number of timer events
• tune Process Server DB - increase log file size & enable file system caching
• BPEL  - 
• maximize the use of micro flow
• use non-incorruptible processes - if macroflow is needed - separate the solution to use microflows and macroflows
• For task and process list queries - use composite query tables
• Use Work Manager based navigation to improve the throughput for long running processes.
• avoid using asynchronous processes unnecessarily.
• avoid overly granular transaction boundaries in SCA

Model & Development:

BPEL / Integration Designer:

• use short running processes - run in one J2EE Transaction with no persistence – Where possible use synchronous interaction for non-interruptible processes
• if macro flow is required create a seperate BPEL
• Avoid using - async calls
• fewer transactional boundaries - best case use      
• Join Transaction (Interface of the called component) - true, 
• Suspend Transaction (Reference of the calling transaction) - false,

• Transaction - any global
• Services that are automated or start other services - web services, enterprise resource applications

Events: 

• start and end - 2 events are sufficient 

Architecture:  

• Choose query tables for task list and process list queries.
• Choose efficient metadata management - 
• performance is better if BO types follow the Java naming standards 
• reuse dataobject type metadata where possible - rather than using DataFactory.create(String URI, String typeName) use DataFactory.create(Type type)             -
• Business State Machine uses more power …  so choose BPEL is possible.
• Use - share by reference libraries where possible
• Ensure content in toolkit is used in several applications.
• BO parsing mode - Applications which Data Streams - like Webservices, SCA components benefit from lazy parsing.  

 

BPMN / BPD:

• Involve Human Interactions     
• Business Process - should have a Business Significance … and not just programming - level granularity

Events:     

• use of Events (CEI) - should be for Business Monitoring - as event emission uses persistent mechanism      
• Business Monitoring should not be confused with IT Monitoring     
• Clients are concerned about state of their business - so use events to track when a task completes / or changes state

Architecture:

• Fast connection between Process Designer and Process Center     
• Minimize the use of Service Tasks -      
• Use searchable business variables - with caution    
• minimize the number of variables used     
• minimize the size of each variable used     
• set variables to null when no longer use - like DB result sets    
• turn off auto-tracking - auto tracking in BPD is not required - enabled by default - if required create tracking groups to track key events. 
  
• avoid BPDs that run perpetually / continuously – as it polls continuously for events -  alternatives - use JMS service or UCA 
• develop efficient coaches          
• Avoid large complex coaches         
• Avoid large / repeating tables - use pagination          
• Always wire coaches to end node     
• Minimize use of Large Javascript scripts - it might produce large DOM models - which is expensive - limit it to 50 lines     
• Avoid direct sql access to internal BPM tables - such as LSW_TASK or LSW_PROCESS - use BPM javascript / rest apis     

Development Best Practice:

• clear variables in exposed human services that are not intended to end 
  
• donot use multi instance loops in the system lane or for batch activities   
• use conditional joins only when necessary
• Avoid global error handling
• Use sequential System lane activities efficiently.
• Ensure Process Center is tuned
• preventing wsdl validation from slow web service performance

References:

http://www.evernote.com/l/AKZrhhusWANG75yXr6HJbHEDMoWmyCvplqM/