In this Global Economy Crisis (GEC) one would think the employing Business Process Management (BPM) ideals in combination with Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to do process execution would be the most logical step…

We call this building composite applications. Why would you spend money in both setting up this Architecture and using technologies that allow process execution to help you?

1. Companies will most likely not want to buy anymore new application systems
2. They might not even want to build new systems too
3. So if current and legacy systems are here to stay for now, how can we maximise its potentials?
4. Business Process Management endeavours to apply a structured discipline to improving, measuring and continuously optimise processes

So if BPM allows you to analyse and document your processes to continually improve them, coupled with SOA’s ideal of orchestrating these same processes defined to pretty much reuse the functionality of existing systems… Wouldn’t that be the best and most logical cost saving exercise an organisation could adopt? And yet retrenchment and other non-value added measures are deployed to save money in this credit crunch time. Key question: “If you don’t know your business processes and its criticality, how do you know where to optimise, shed and save?”. Sadly, in some cases, the BPM initiative itself is the first program to be taken off in efforts to save money…

The true crutz of process to execution is to be able to use technology to physically “translate” from a modelling notation (e.g. EPC, Event-Drive Process Chains,BPMN, Business Process Modelling Notation or even UML’s Activity Diagrams) to something IT can use to compile into some engine or code. Example? BPEL – Business Process Execution Language.

Many vendors and technologies actually already allows this “no-loss-in-translation-type” transformation. Concepts great and simple! I’ve model my process design and requirements in a comfortable business-type notation and somehow it gets translated into something IT can understand and “do something with”, IT-wise to get it working. Great!

However, many people don’t talk about the details… The real transformation! It’s like trying to translate English into Mandarin or vice-versa. Because the anatomy of the language is essentially different, there are things that are required and are lost when it is actually translated. Some level of “massaging” is required… Some simple examples below:

1. “Wait events” in business terms indicate that there is a time lapse involved. From an IT view that could be asynchronous or just simply another (IT) process. This context then gets ignored or lost.
2. (IT) processes operate in a very “transactional” way. The concept of multiple start and end events triggering itself or others is quite foreign to BPEL. Workaround is again to ignore this as it is something business needs to know but when IT puts it together, it doesn’t really matter.

There are a few more interesting qwerks when we transition from Business into IT. I suppose these “qwerks” transend into many levels both socially and technologically!

I must be working too long in this space. You know this when you even have bookmark to links like this!