BRIDGING THE B USINESS-IT DIVIDE IN E NTERPRISE C LASS P ROCESSES

Transcription

1 Bruce Silver Associates Independent Expertise in BPM Industry Trend Reports BRIDGING THE B USINESS-IT DIVIDE IN E NTERPRISE C LASS P ROCESSES Agility and the Roundtripping Problem When business managers talk about agility, they mean more than simply SOA and application integration. To them, agility means a faster way to implement and maintain end-to-end business processes involving both people and systems. Business process management (BPM) not only provides the tools and infrastructure to build and manage such implementations, but is trying to empower business to play a more active role in the implementation. At one time, business analysts simply created process models to generate requirements and handed them off to IT for implementation in a separate toolset. That implementation, however, was based on a separate metamodel, separate data model, and separate programming model, all different from those used to create the process model. The result was the well known roundtripping problem the model could not be kept in sync with the evolving implementation. That hampers agility because the end result cannot be evaluated until the solution is deployed in production, typically months later. At the pace of business change today, that s not agile enough. Today, leading second-generation BPM suites (BPMS) have eliminated the roundtripping problem by rearchitecting around a unified toolset shared by business and IT, used for both process modeling and executable process design. That means one process metamodel, one data model, and one programming model. The interface between process modeling and implementation design is no longer a handoff but involves close business-it collaboration, enabling a more iterative development style and fulfilling the promised business empowerment. Until now, the BPMS offerings that work this way have all been geared toward human-centric business processes, long-running but relatively low in daily instance volume, rather than the highvolume, event-driven, SOA-based transactions that drive the company s core business. The SOA-oriented BPM suites that address the latter still maintain separate and technically mismatched toolsets for business and IT, and continue to face the roundtripping issue. Now Vitria, one of the early pioneers of BPM, is filling that gap with M 3 O, a new offering that brings to high-volume, event-driven transactional processes the same type of business-it collaboration found in leading human-centric BPM suites. Vitria M 3 O provides a unified design environment for human task management, service orchestration, and event management, in which the implementation is layered directly on top of process models created by business analysts. In fact, M 3 O goes beyond leading human-centric BPM suites with a Web 2.0 user interaction paradigm, a common repository shared by business and IT, and a rich framework for policy-based event response and exception resolution. BPMN: The Real BPM Standard A few years ago, it was commonly believed that BPEL, a web service orchestration language standard from OASIS, would become the de facto standard for BPM. But that turned out not to be the case. While BPEL is a big improvement over Java for fully automated straight-through processes, it ignores fundamental concerns of BPM, such as: Managing end-to-end processes as a single unit, spanning multiple functions and systems. BPEL has no concept of subprocesses, for example. Bruce Silver Associates Bear Valley Road Aptos CA USA Contact: Bruce Silver, Principal bruce@brsilver.com

2 Supporting human tasks and integration activities as first-class process constructs. BPEL ignores human tasks. Standardizing a business-friendly diagrammatic view of the implementation, with roundtripping between the execution language and the diagram. Moreover, the blockoriented nature of BPEL prevents such roundtripping with virtually all modeling notations, which are graph-oriented flowcharts. As a result, BPEL is mostly used today by SOA suites for composing coarse-grained automated services out of low-level APIs and methods, but has fallen out of favor for BPM. Instead, the key BPM standard has turned out to be BPMN the Business Process Modeling Notation from OMG. In contrast to BPEL, BPMN does support end-to-end processes in a single model, does put human tasks and service tasks on a common footing, and does support a business-friendly diagrammatic view of the process. But BPMN just standardizes the process model; it does not define the executable process implementation. In most BPM suites, that design is still vendor-proprietary. Nevertheless, the appeal of a common modeling standard in the end trumped the appeal of a common execution language. Leading human-centric BPM suite vendors found they could unify the environment for modeling and implementation design by layering the executable design tools on top of BPMN avoiding the roundtripping problem and enabling a new rapid iterative implementation style based on direct collaboration between business and IT. That means the process model is not just initial business requirements for the implementation, but part of the actual implementation itself. Business does not create the executable implementation, just the model, or abstract business view. If the developer has to change the model, that change is always visible to business through the BPMN diagram. Collaborative process implementation means faster deployment cycles and more agile response to changing business requirements. Bringing Enterprise Class Values to Collaborative BPM Such a BPMN-enabled rapid iterative implementation style allowed those human-centric BPMS vendors to outperform larger SOA-oriented suppliers because they could deliver implementation cycles of a few weeks as opposed to several months. As a result, that kind of agility has now made BPMN the buyer checklist item that BPEL once was. But simply providing BPMN modeling in the suite does not by itself ensure agility or avoid the roundtripping problem. Those require a unified modeling/design environment architected from the ground up for business-it collaboration. That s difficult when a BPEL process engine is married to a BPMN modeling tool, still the typical approach of SOA-oriented BPMS vendors, because BPEL s block orientation restricts the structure of allowable BPMN diagrams. A perfectly valid BPMN diagram may generate a long list of errors when you validate for BPEL export. The result is either a much less business-friendly BPMN tool that enforces the restrictions of BPEL, or an imperfect export of BPMN to BPEL where the roundtripping problem still has not gone away. Avoiding the roundtripping problem demands compatibility between the process engine and the BPMN process model, not a separate process structure for modeling and executable design. Thus a gap has emerged in the development of second-generation BPM combining the BPMNbased collaborative modeling/design paradigm of the human-centric BPMS pureplays with the key strengths of SOA-based BPM suites: scalable event-triggered behavior, a framework for automated exception handling, and enterprise-class scalability and quality of service. Upgrading business-empowered implementation from purely human-centric processes to enterprises-class processes means going beyond the functionality of the BPMN-oriented pureplays. BPMN, after Bruce Silver Associates

3 all, is just the abstract activity flow. It does not deal with data, or with policy-based behavior, or with modeling events independently of process. Historically, these have been strictly developer concerns. Vitria M 3 O now provides all that, including additional editors that bring even technical details like process data, events, and event policies into the realm of business empowerment. Bridging the traditional business-it divide means adding new layers of business-oriented abstraction, and encapsulating that abstraction in a business-friendly user interface. For example, M 3 O supports complex data objects through business-oriented vocabulary management, shielding modelers from arcane XPath expressions, and allows business to create a catalog of event types and specify policies that determine the triggered behavior when that event occurs. M 3 O also provides a stunning next-generation look and feel at both design time and runtime, using Web 2.0 technology built on Adobe Flex. And unlike most BPM suites, M 3 O does not ask business analysts to install Eclipse on their laptops. Everything is browser-based. Vitria Technology, BPM Pioneer M 3 O s next-generation BPMS technology comes not from a new startup but from a true BPM pioneer. Vitria Technology introduced its first BPM offering in 1998 to help telcos deal with real-time provisioning of cell phones. Leveraging its own enterprise messaging backbone, Vitria was the first EAI vendor to take an end-to-end process view of integration, and could rightfully claim to have invented what became known as integration-centric BPM. Vitria s customers now include over half of the 15 largest telecoms companies worldwide, 4 of the top 10 US healthcare payers, plus hundreds of others financial services, investment banking, insurance, energy, manufacturing, government, retail, and entertainment. The processes Vitria handles are mostly high-volume straight-through transactions, enhanced with a framework for cataloguing and resolving exceptions that may occur. This framework provides a consistent infrastructure for handling exceptions at any level, from low level system faults to SLA violations to business events to high-level compliance and productivity problems. Within the SOA-oriented BPM space, Vitria s exception resolution technology set it apart from its competitors. Now with M 3 O, Vitria is reinventing SOA-oriented BPM once again, by rearchitecting it for business-empowered implementation across the board, from executable BPMN models to event policies to real-time process intelligence, without abandoning its traditional strengths in enterprise-class middleware and comprehensive exception resolution. In the next few sections, we ll take a closer look at what M 3 O provides and how it works. M 3 O and Business-Empowered Implementation Abstraction: Precondition for Business-IT Collaboration The key to bridging the gap between business and IT is providing the proper level of abstraction. Abstraction allows business analysts to describe processes, data, and rules in a familiar language, stripped of unnecessary technical detail, without compromising the developer s ability to make that description executable in production by adding technical properties. One part of abstraction is simply terminology. While IT might talk about activity orchestrations, schemas, and rulesets, business describes those concepts as process steps, vocabularies, and policies (Figure 1). Bruce Silver Associates

4 Business Business Step Vocabulary Policy GAP IT Process Activity Data Schema Rule Set Figure 1. Business-empowered implementation requires abstractions of technical concepts and a new BPM vocabulary. Source: Vitria Web 2.0 Modeling Environment M 3 O s collaborative implementation style begins with a unified environment that supports both business-level abstraction and full technical specification as separate views of a common model, a common repository for business- and IT-oriented artifacts, and a powerful J2EE-based runtime environment that can directly execute those artifacts in high-volume production (Figure 2). Figure 2. M 3 O provides a single model shared by business and IT, with a common repository for modeling and implementation artifacts. Source: Vitria The design environment is a Rich Internet Application, fully browser-based in the Web 2.0 style, built with the beautiful look and feel that Adobe Flex provides. It supports a role-based user experience, so business and IT users are exposed only to the workspaces and views that they need, while underneath what is created is a single integrated model, a single business process solution. The Model Is the Implementation M 3 O is a full BPM suite, a unified environment supporting process orchestration, human workflow, policy-based event management, and real-time business activity monitoring and analytics (Figure 3). Unlike most BPM suites optimized for enterprise class processes, M 3 O process models do not generate code that is then tweaked by IT. The model, once technical properties have been applied through wizards and point-click dialogs, is the implementation. That is really the essence of the collaborative implementation style. Executable design of processes, data, and policies is fully integrated in the M 3 O modeling environment, and business- IT collaboration is supported throughout. Bruce Silver Associates

5 Figure 3. M 3 O functional architecture. Source: Vitria While a similar collaborative implementation style has been offered by some human-centric BPM suites, M 3 O is geared toward service-oriented and event-driven processes, the high-volume enterprise-class transaction processes that drive the core business of the company. M 3 O layers its native BPMN engine on top of SOA, including an enterprise bus for services and events, adapters, and support for complex data objects and transformations. M 3 O works not only with Vitria s own bus and middleware, but with popular SOA platforms like WebSphere and Oracle as well. Execution Layered on BPMN M 3 O fully supports the new business-empowered process implementation style based on BPMN without roundtripping, and upgrades it to enterprise class processes. The process modeling editor (Figure 4) provides drag-and-drop editing with a palette of BPMN-standard flow objects, including human tasks, service tasks, and script tasks, embedded and reusable subprocesses, gateways and intermediate events. Double-clicking a subprocess allows expanded flow to be edited at a child process level, supporting the BPMN s inherently hierarchical top-down modeling style. As modeled by a business analyst, the process is merely descriptive, not executable. Turning this into an executable implementation, however, does not start over in a different process diagram, but simply adds implementation properties data, services, task user interfaces, etc. to these standard BPMN activities. Bruce Silver Associates

6 Figure 4. Process models support the BPMN standard, including subprocesses, gateways, and intermediate events. Source: Vitria Business analysts and IT process architects share the same tool, but editors for the more technical information can be hidden from business-oriented modelers. Those modelers still can provide guidance or requirements to the process architects through annotations, which can be selectively displayed or hidden via layers in the diagram. For example, in Figure 5, annotations in the business layer have been enabled. Selective enabling of editors in the shared environment, combined with selectable display of business and technical annotations, directly supports close business-it collaboration and its associated agile iterative development style. Figure 5. Annotation layers support business-it collaboration in the diagram itself. Source: Vitria Bruce Silver Associates

7 BPMN tasks created in the process model are made executable by adding implementation properties (Figure 6), such as the specific service and port type, endpoint properties, and quality of service, along with data mappings to and from the service interface. This is an IT function, but it is all point-click dialogs, not code. Figure 6. Implementation properties are layered on top of the abstract BPMN activity flow. Source: Vitria A palette of subprocesses preconfigured by IT, called business steps, is exposed to process modelers for ready reuse, another example of business-oriented abstraction in M 3 O. Dragging a business step from the palette into the process diagram reveals its input and output data parameters graphically to the modeler (Figure 7). Figure 7. Business steps are reusable subprocesses preconfigured by IT. Source: Vitria Bruce Silver Associates

8 Data Modeling In the past, even human-centric BPM suites tended to hide data modeling from business analysts, since it was too technical. In enterprise-class processes, data is even more technical, based on complex business objects modeled as XML schemas. Nevertheless, to collaborate on the implementation, business has to be able to describe or view process data elements. There s no way around it. M 3 O solves this problem by providing business abstractions of data. M 3 O s schema editor can import XML schemas, but then maps individual data elements in those schemas to more businessfriendly data vocabularies, called groups and fields. For example, Figure 8 illustrates an imported order schema, with XPath mappings to groups and fields. Internally, M 3 O uses the schemas and XPath to reference data, but the vocabulary exposed to business users is more readily understood. Figure 8. Data elements are mapped to the business-friendly vocabulary of groups and fields. Source: Vitria Human Tasks What BPMN calls user tasks become workflow tasks in M 3 O. Tasks are defined independently of process activities and are reusable across processes. Each task is assigned a task type (Figure 9), picked from a list specified in the schema editor. The task type defines the task steps and their associated data, instructions, and user interface; performer assignment; possible end states; variables; timers, alerts, and escalations. A task is inherently a multi-step procedure. Each task step has instructions and data fields that can be specified by the business analyst (Figure 10) and its own user interface layout, so that the task as a whole represents a screenflow. M 3 O provides a graphical screen editor that defines form layouts for each step in the task. Constraints on data fields allow validation of task data independent of the form definition. Bruce Silver Associates

9 Figure 9. Workflow task types specify the data, user interface, and other details of each step of the task. Source: Vitria Figure 10. Business analysts can specify fields and form labels for each task step. Source: Vitria M 3 O s user model is based on workgroups maintained in the Manage (administration) area. Each workgroup is authorized to perform a specified list of task types (Figure 11). Within the authorized workgroup, the task can be assigned to a shared pool, or to specified users or groups, or manually at runtime by a manager. Figure 11. Workgroups in the organization are authorized to perform one or more task types. Source: Vitria Figure 12 illustrates the user interface at runtime. Tabs at the top display several worklist views (My Tasks, Available Tasks, Managed Tasks), and the bottom half of the screen provides the user interface for the selected task. Columns in the worklist can be configured independently for each task type to display, sort, or filter on user-specified fields. Figure 12. Worklist and simple task user interface. Source: Vitria Bruce Silver Associates

10 Event Policies Processes interact with data in the form of events. An event is a collection of XML structures, or documents, communicated in a message. M 3 O provides a rich framework for policy-based event management. That is, when a particular event is received by the process, the event policy specifies the process that is triggered. M 3 O Event Manager allows business to collaborate in the implementation by specifying rules, or policies, that govern which process should be initiated for each type of event. Event policies are essentially subscriptions to events published to M 3 O, typically through either JMS or a file, enabling a loosely coupled but tightly governed response to exceptions (Figure 13). Each event class (event space) and type (event code) listed in the Event Manager sidebar (Figure 14) is linked to a triggered process, typically resolving an exception indicated by the event. Figure 13. Event policies define the process triggered by specific events. Source: Vitria M 3 O event policies are based on rules evaluated on the platform s native rule engine. The policy defines rules to identify and extract events from data sources, filter the specific events of interest, correlate and aggregate related events, and specify triggered actions typically launching a process. The event policy editor provides a variety of business-friendly rules constructs, including constraints, pattern matching, regular expressions, rule sequencing and nesting, and time/event space correlation and aggregation (Figure 15). Bruce Silver Associates

11 Figure 14. Event Manager links each event (left sidebar) with a resolution process. Source: Vitria Figure 15. Event policy editor allows business-friendly specification of rules to filter and aggregate events. Source: Vitria Events can be captured directly from log data by pattern matching (Figure 16). M 3 O Event Manager provides a comprehensive set of parsing expressions to identify and populate event variables, or to automatically create events based on changes or additions to source data. Bruce Silver Associates

12 Figure 16. Rules defined in Event Manager can parse log data and translate it into events. Source: Vitria Monitoring and Process Intelligence The ability to specify process implementation using the same diagram used by business to model the process creates business-meaningful context for monitoring performance at runtime. M 3 O s Monitoring workspace allows process owners and managers to trace the progress of individual instances through the diagram, with tables of timestamps and runtime data linked to the process diagram (Figure 17). Such performance monitoring in process context is becoming common in human-centric BPM, but it is still unusual in enterprise-class SOA-oriented BPM. Figure 17. M 3 O Monitor traces instance-level performance in BPMN context. Source: Vitria Bruce Silver Associates

13 Monitoring typically does not begin at the instance level, but rather in high-level aggregated views of process performance displayed in real-time management dashboards. In M 3 O s Monitoring workspace, Vitria addresses the challenge of extracting process intelligence from disparate voluminous event streams related to business transactions. The Monitor workspace tries to give the process owner the same kind of consolidated strategic information that an equities trader has on the desktop, and with the same kind of advanced real-time visualization at the process level and even across multiple processes (Figure 18). Figure 18. Monitor displays aggregated business views of event streams in real time. Source: Vitria M 3 O s Web 2.0 visualization technology is ideally suited to Monitor s real-time dashboards, which are composed as mashups of disparate event stream information. Leveraging the native event processor, users can filter, correlate, and aggregate process events, and view performance data graphically in real time. Business users can create tables, charts, and drilldown views of performance metrics, including service levels and comparison of actual versus plan or forecast. Drilldown allows process owners to visualize overall process performance and resolve problems quickly. The dashboards provide visual triggers identifying process hot spots, with drilldown to individual instances. Configuring drilldowns is done by simply wiring corresponding events and aggregation parameters between the various tables and charts in the drilldown (Figure 19). Bruce Silver Associates

14 Figure 19. Dashboard drilldowns are configured graphically by wiring table and chart elements together. Source: Vitria Beyond Agility: Integrated Governance The market impetus behind BPM today is closely related to business empowerment, granting business a more direct role in specifying process flows and data, the policies that govern eventtriggered actions, and the visualization of business-meaningful performance metrics in management dashboards. BPM suites based on the new collaborative implementation style, leveraging BPMN in a unified modeling environment shared by business and IT, has already proven successful in human-centric BPM, where enterprise-class concerns like events, quality of service, and other aspects of SOA infrastructure are secondary. M 3 O now extends that business empowerment to the mission-critical transaction processes that drive the bottom line. Bridging the business-it divide in enterprise-class processes is usually described from the standpoint of agility. Collaboration on process implementation allows new or improved products and services to come to market more quickly, or be changed more rapidly in response to the changing competitive environment. But agility is not the only benefit. Equally important is improved governance, or policy-based management of processes at both design time and runtime. Collaborative BPM raises new governance issues. For example, who is authorized to modify, test, and deploy changes to the process model? M 3 O s unified modeling environment manages those authorizations down to specific workspaces and editors on a role or group basis. Also, what processes are allowed to invoke specific services in the SOA registry? M 3 O allows such service consumption policies to be specified and enforced automatically upon WSDL import when WS- Policy definitions are present, and again at runtime using WS-Management. Future versions of the M 3 O repository will be enhanced with impact analysis, so the effect of changes to shared services can be tracked by both business and IT. Event policies are another important governance issue. What actions are required for any type of event, whether a system fault, SLA violation, or high-level business event? Which users or groups are authorized to perform which tasks, or perform escalation procedures when SLAs are violated or in jeopardy? M 3 O gives business a direct role in those policy specifications, as well. The next generation of BPM suites will not be so cleanly divided between human-centric and integration-centric offerings. Customers want their BPM platforms to support both, and combine the business-empowered collaborative style that has proven successful in human-centric Bruce Silver Associates

15 processes to apply to their mission-critical SOA-based processes as well, improving both agility and governance. That s the next frontier in BPM, and Vitria s M 3 O has taken a major step across it. Bruce Silver January 2008 Bruce Silver Associates