Week One

Demystifying Process
Both Anglo-American and German literature have always considered processes a part of management philosophy. German literature discussed “Ablauforganisation” (meaning organization's processes) as early as 1930. Father of scientific management F. W. Taylor talked about “one best way” and scientific plan of work. However traditionally, these processes were tucked away in manuals or casted in Information Systems. BPMS allows us to create processes on the fly and implement it using existing information systems.

Business processes can be defined from multiple perspective. Understanding various attributes of processes can help in creating a valid process diagram. As a academic discipline BPM has gained from quality control, six sigma, BPR, business intelligence and CASE etc.

Technical evolution of BPMS
Separation of concern and information hiding has guided most of software architecture evolution and BPM is no exception. While traditional EAI tools did provide support to execute business processes, it was workflow management software that made process a first class citizen. With WFMS one can develop an explicit process representation and execute it. With the arrival of SOA, BPMS can propell processes to third wave to enable companies and workers to create and optimize processes on the fly.

A recent BP Trends report covered history of BPMS quite well. According to this report BPMS has four layered architecture covering standards (J2EE, SOA etc) Engines (workflow, rule etc) Tools (modeler, BAM etc) and programming interfaces.

Reading:
(Another link to above two papers are \\192.168.1.32\profile\BPMS_Pre_mid\Reading material)
 * Chapter 2 and 3 of text book
 * Chapter " Introduction" and "Evolution of enterprise systems architecture" from Mathias Weske's book "Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures", (2007) (Hardcopy distributed in class)
 * Pages 54 - 63 from a Chapter titled “Management Support for Process Organization” from Michael zur Muehlen’s book “Workflow based Process Controlling” http://www.bpm-research.com/download/book/Michael_zur_Muehlen_-_Workflow-based_Process_Controlling_(Web-Small).pdf
 * BPM Product Report Introduction and Overview at http://www.bptrends.com/reports_landing.cfm

Reference (not needed for exams):

 * “Reengineering work: Don’t automate, obliterate” by Michael Hammer published in Harvard Business Review July-August 1990.


 * APQC Process Classification Framework available at http://www.apqc.org/portal/apqc/ksn/content?paf_gear_id=contentgearhome&paf_dm=full&pageselect=kbase&knowledgeTree=ksntopic&browseCategory=Root