vincent
12-12-2008 12:31 PM
Michelle Cantara at Gartner just
blogged about someone in the financial services industry building a “trade exceptions” system. OK, so just another BPM case study, you might think. But there were some interesting phrases that deserved closer attention:
“I patiently explained than exception handling tends to involve a great many process paths, many of which are undocumented, are handed down by oral tradition. The business users can’t possibly “grok” the solution implications of all these permutations.”
This does not sound like a conventional business process flow or workflow for assigning exceptions to staff. If there are a great many undocumented process paths, then that implies some sort of dynamic process (such as event- and/or rule-driven process activities). And if this was modeled in a convention process flow, it could easily end up being “large and fragile” as opposed to simple and maintainable.
“More importantly is lack of process context. The in-house trade control group gets these exception trades back from the outsourcer. They are accompanied by lots of data, but there is no way to tell what process steps that exception has already been through, and what the data means as a result.”
So maybe they are processing events (trade exceptions)? And they probably need to either maintain the state of the transactions in (and for) the exception process, or do some (typically rule-based) analysis of the exception and data to deduce its status in the underlying (trades) process. Quite possibly there are important interrelationships between these exceptions, too.
“After hearing all of this, I launched into my BPM pitch - since I had a captive audience, stuck in the car with me. My friend insisted that neither IT or the trade control group will go for a model-driven approach.”
Hoorah for BPM - the obvious solution!
Maybe, maybe not: Business Process Management [*1] invariably involves
process modeling as a prerequisite to process execution and runtime management, but today is mostly concerned with (simple) process orchestrations or flows… for which the above process might not be a good fit [*2].
Presumably the relevant IT department is savvy enough to realize that “business processes” are not exclusively orchestrations / activity diagrams; that “model-driven processes” can be done by, but
not exclusively, “BPM”; and that there are other model-driven technologies (like
CEP) better suited to some event-driven rule-based automated business processes.
Presumably.
Notes:
[1] Assuming Michelle is using BPM in its most
analyst-friendly form,
“Business Process Management”, not the rarer more technical term
“Business Process Modeling”. Regardless, the latter is often just a synonym for BPMN process flows.
[2]* TIBCO has an example best-of-breed
BPM tool that includes the traditional orchestration of process flows in BPMN via*
BusinessStudio, but also can handle goal-driven dynamic process models via
iProcess Conductor, and event- and rule- driven
“BPM+” via
TIBCO CEP / BusinessEvents.
Source...
12-12-2008
