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"Compuware Acquires Proxima Technology. In January 2007, Compuware acquired Proxima Technology. Uniface is Compuware's development environment for building, renewing and integrating the largest and most complex enterprise applications. The Uniface Application Platform Suite (APS) delivers an enterprise capable solution. It provides application development, integration, business process management and user interface frameworks through software products that can be used both individually, or together."
Source : Compuware
The Impact of IT Service on Business Process Management
Business process management is also known as :
Business Process Mgt,
Business Process Management Tools,
Business Process Modeling ,
Business Process,
Business Process Reengineering,
Business Process Systems,
Business Process Guide,
Business Process Workflow,
Process Improvement,
BPM life-cycle,
BPM System (BPMS),
Performance Management,
Process-driven Application,
Business Process Modeling Notation,
Process Management.
Key Concepts Discussed
Business Process ManagementThe Agile EnterpriseBusiness Service ManagementContinuous ImprovementBusiness-IT AlignmentBusiness Value of IT
Utility ComputingOn-Demand ComputingGrid Computingrocess Service Level Agreements
Contents
- About this Document
- Management Summary
- Business Process Management
- Business Service Management
- Enhancing BPM with BSM
- FuegoBPM
- Centauri Business Service Manager
- Provisioning IT Service in the Agile Enterprise
- Summary
About this Document
This white paper describes the benefits of operating business process management (BPM) side-byside
with business service management (BSM). It details the rationale behind the partnership
between Fuego and Proxima Technology, leading vendors in BPM and BSM, respectively. BPM and
BSM are emerging technologies that represent the "state of the art" in their respective markets:
BPM is concerned with the orchestration and management of effective business processes, while
BSM focuses on the operational effectiveness of the enabling IT services. These technologies are
mutually beneficial to one another.
- BSM provides BPM with information about the impact of IT on the business, allows an
organization to align IT with the business, and continuously optimizes IT services in order
to deliver effective IT-dependent business processes;
- BPM provides BSM with information about the business demand for IT services which
becomes key in provisioning IT services as organizations prepare for on-demand utility
computing scenarios.
This white paper is intended for managers interested in implementing robust BPM solutions in ITdependent
business scenarios and/or managers looking to lay down a basic foundation for effective
on-demand utility computing.
Management Summary
Today, much attention is focused on technologies that enable the agile enterprise - where agility is
a measure of an organizations responsiveness to change, for instance, to exploit a new market
opportunity. In this context, agility refers less to corporate cultural issues but more to the
management and execution of IT-dependent business processes. Business process management
(BPM) plays a significant role in promoting agility. Agility is achieved by allowing business process
scenarios to be defined independently of IT implementation considerations and then by providing
systems implementation facilities that bind business processes to the IT services that enable them.
This allows effective business processes to be set up quickly and allows changes to be made either
to business processes or the supporting IT infrastructure without the massive upheaval associated
with traditional approaches.
BPM spans multiple enterprise applications, corporate departments, and business partners and is an
umbrella term for process-centric, business process modeling and analysis (BPMA), business
intelligence (BI), business activity monitoring (BAM), enterprise application integration (EAI), and
workflow management. An effective BPM implementation needs to embrace information about the
quality of the IT infrastructure that the business processes are dependent on. That is, understanding
the impact of IT on the business is critical since there exists a link between IT application system
quality and business success. For example, a drop in order volume may be caused by a Web
response problem and have nothing to do with an operational BPM issue. Once this relationship
between IT service and business processes is understood, this same model can be turned "on its
head" and used to show the business demand for IT services, which becomes critical for IT service
provisioning in on-demand computing environments.
Such a solution is achieved by integrating BSM into BPM. BSM is an IT systems management
function that measures IT service quality, reports this to the BPM solution, optimizes quality where
there are shortfalls, deals with unexpected problems on an ad hoc basis and, going forward,
provides the mechanism for provisioning IT services in an on-demand computing environment.
Ignoring the IT infrastructure represents a significant threat to BPM. It is for this reason that
Gartner identifies "staying at too high a level and never dipping into the technology levels" as one of
seven issues for BPM failure.
These technologies clearly create new opportunities for businesses but, as with all technology,
require careful planning. This white paper looks at an alliance that has been formed between BPM
vendor Fuego and BSM vendor Proxima Technology to address these issues. This alliance provides a
combined product solution that achieves alignment between IT and the business, provides a stable
IT platform for the execution of IT-dependent business processes, promotes agility through business
process orchestration capabilities, and provides business volumetric information that is required in
on-demand grid computing. Furthermore, by using Centauri Business Service Manager service
level management capability, Fuego BPM users benefit from an automated solution for measuring
and monitoring process service level agreements (P-SLA). SLA reports are generated to show both
business and IT SLA compliance. These reports are automatically distributed at preset time intervals
by email as PDF attachments or are made available as part of Centauri's balanced scorecard (BSC)
presentation capability.
Business Process Management
Once labeled a "nice to have", business process management (BPM) has become a key ingredient in
the success formula of competitive organizations. BPM helps organizations design, deploy, execute,
manage, and improve the effectiveness of their business processes. In the context of this white
paper, the term "business process management" is used as an umbrella term for all disciplines and
supporting technologies that result in business process efficiency. This includes business intelligence
(BI), business activity monitoring (BAM), and corporate performance management (CPM).
Achieving competitive advantage through process excellence is a complex undertaking that must
address a number of inter-related, but often disparate, dimensions: organizations, people,
processes, and (IT) systems. While focused efforts in any of these areas may produce short-term
benefits, true process excellence can only be achieved by addressing all areas in a holistic fashion,
driven by specific business goals. BPM unites all of these in a single, cohesive framework.
- Organizations. BPM breaks through organizational silos by taking a process-centric
approach. Organizational boundaries, both inside and outside the enterprise, are no longer
barriers to successful process execution.
- People. By treating people as a service provider to the business process, involvement of
human participants in a business process can be effectively managed. Visibility is greatly
increased, both at the worker and manager levels, allowing corrective action to be taken
before it is too late.
- Process. The primary dimension of process excellence is, of course, the process itself. By
allowing processes to be adapted quickly to respond to changing business conditions or to
incorporate improvements, BPM provides the foundation for quality initiatives like Six
Sigma.
- System. With BPM, applications, databases, and other systems provide services to the
business process, allowing the business process to read and update systems of record. This
requires computer systems to be based on process (e.g.,service) foundations rather than
functional foundations.
This white paper is concerned with the system dimension. In the longer term, how BPM forms a
foundation for forecasting business demand for IT services in an on-demand utility computing
scenario. More immediately, how BPM users can ensure IT service quality does not negatively
impact the effectiveness of the IT-dependent business processes.
Although BPM has evolved to accommodate the many changes in the way businesses are now using
technology, leaving IT application service quality out of the equation threatens to limit the
capabilities of BPM as it will present a distorted picture to those accountable for the affected
business service. That is, because of the dependence between business and IT, BPM needs to factor
in this aspect to provide a true representation of the operational effectiveness of the company. For
example, in an online loan application system, a BPM system may identify "application drop-outs"
and abnormally "high application failure rates", but the IT components that are the root cause of
this problem - such as poor Website response or the failure of a firewall - may not be part of the
BPM picture.
Addressing this problem is not as complicated as it may sound. The IT infrastructure is already well
managed through tools and technologies - a discipline referred to as network and systems
management (NSM). Unfortunately, the language of NSM is poles apart from BPM, so some sort of
"translator" is required to bridge the gap between the two. In particular, this "translator" needs to
overcome issues that include:
- NSM data is too granular. NSM provides information about individual components such
as databases, CPUs, network connections, printers, and so on - information that in
isolation is not readily understood by BPM.
- NSM tools collect vast amounts of data. From a purely operational perspective, the
sheer volume of data held in most NSM tools would swamp a BPM solution.
- NSM is not aligned with business processes. The mapping between the IT application
services and the business processes they support is not known, therefore the BPM solution
would have no knowledge about how IT problems impact business processes.
- NSM is devoid of continuous improvement. Process optimization is a core aspect of
Third Wave BSM. This dimension is missing from NSM.
Although these problems question the value of NSM, the reality is that NSM tools have been
designed to fulfill a very different function than BPM. As a result, comparisons between the two are
moot. However, since fundamentally the NSM data is useful to BPM, creating a bridge between the
two will ensure that the IT dimension is factored into the equation.
Business Service Management
Business service management (BSM) is an emerging IT discipline that is concerned with measuring
and improving the business value of IT. The two important themes of BSM are IT-business
alignment and IT service optimization. As organizations increase their dependence on IT, business
service management becomes more critical and the adage, "if you improve IT, you improve the
business," becomes significant. BSM tools work by analyzing the vast amount of status data
available in the running IT system to determine the quality-of-service (QoS) as end-users and
customers see it. Such measures of IT service quality are then cross-referenced against the
business processes they enable to display how IT contributes (or otherwise) to an organization
hitting its goals and objectives. Furthermore, it provides a business driven approach to problem
solving, quality improvement, and IT service provisioning. With BSM technology, an IT organization
ensures critical-to-quality (CTQ) business processes are properly supported and invests in service
delivery at levels that are appropriate to business criticality.
BSM links NSM to BPM and results in the formation of a meaningful IT system dimension alongside
other dimensions of organization, people, and process. In addition, BSM brings many specific
benefits to IT, including:
- Investment in service delivery is appropriate to business benefit and over-capitalization is
avoided.
- Problem resolution is prioritized in line with business requirements.
- IT service improvement is initiated only if there is a real payback to the business.
- Business process owners are aware of service disruption and can take action to mitigate the
consequences to the business.
- Executives understand the value of their IT investment.
- Change is easier to manage.
BSM technology is likely to become more prominent in the future as organizations exploit more
cost-effective computing models. Utility computing is one such model as it allows IT services to be
acquired on an "as needed" basis. For example, a retailer is able to acquire the additional services it
needs to support the busy Christmas trading season but is not burdened with idle equipment for the
rest of the year. Since BSM is concerned with understanding and improving how IT services are
used by business processes, then the role of BSM technology in this utility computing model
becomes obvious. Instead of showing the impact of IT on the business, the same model can be used
as the basis for IT service provisioning in the utility model. That is, if we execute additional business
processes, what IT services need to be provisioned? Since this capability is massively enhanced
when fed with business volumetric information taken directly from the BPM tool, this aspect forms a
key part of the BPM/BSM value proposition and will be discussed later in this paper.
Enhancing BPM with BSM
In 2004, Fuego and Proxima Technology formed an alliance that significantly bolstered the IT
system dimension and provided a solid foundation for on-demand utility computing going forward.
Figure 2 shows the symbiotic nature of this relationship. Proxima Technology's Centauri Business
Service Manager provides a bridge between the IT system layer and FuegoBPM?. NSM data is
aggregated to form a more meaningful construct, irrelevant data is filtered out, the mapping
between IT and the business processes is defined and subjected to a continuous improvement
process (using Six Sigma). As a result, the impact of IT on the business can be factored into the
overall determination of business process effectiveness by FuegoBPM, with any negative impact
being eliminated by Centauri. If that were not benefit enough, going forward, as organizations look
to capitalize on utility based on-demand computing models, this mapping of IT service to business
process can be inverted to show the business demand for IT and provide important input for IT
service provisioning.
FuegoBPM
Rated by Gartner as a leading visionary in BPM, FuegoBPM allows organizations to move from an
application-centric to a process-centric approach to running their businesses. By orchestrating the
movement of work between people, applications, and organizations, FuegoBPM allows organizations
to make their applications work the way their business works, not the other way around, and
provides a complete set of tools for designing, deploying, executing, managing, and improving
business processes. FuegoBPM is illustrated in Figure 3. It consists of the following components:
- Process Designer. Enables business analysts to design the business process,
incorporating roles, activities, and business rules that can span departments and even
enterprises.
- Process Studio. Used by developers, the Process Studio enables integration of underlying
applications and infrastructure as services that support the business process.
- Process Portal. During process execution, the Process Portal delivers work to human
participants in the business process.
- Process Manager. The Process Manager provides real-time feedback on process
execution, allowing managers to respond to exceptional conditions.
- Process Dashboard. Using historical data, the Process Dashboard provides the basis for
continuous improvement initiatives, including balancing of resources across multiple
processes.
Centauri Business Service Manager
Centauri Business Service Manager provides a BSM solution that is used by the IT department to
improve the quality of IT service. Just as BPM is concerned with managing the workflow of business
processes, Centauri is concerned with the workflow of IT processes. Centauri is ideally suited to
bridge the gap between NSM and BPM. Such a bridge is illustrated in Figure 4. Centauri is
particularly applicable because it connects to the greatest number of sources, is the most scalable,
most efficient, and has the most comprehensive support for continuous improvement (using Six
Sigma). Centauri provides two integration options for BPM: loose or tight. A loosely integrated
scenario occurs when Centauri simply supplies "data blocks" of information to a BPM dashboard.
That is, data about IT service quality is displayed alongside data regarding business process quality.
The advantage of this approach is that the IT dimension is accommodated quickly and cheaply. The
downside is that data about IT service quality cannot be correlated and analyzed alongside data
about business process efficiency. Tight integration occurs when Centauri data is fed into the BPM
and an IT system dimension is established alongside other dimensions. Clearly, tight integration
provides the greatest opportunity for process optimization, although today Centauri is loosely
coupled with FuegoBPM.
Centauri presents a business context for IT services by maintaining a mapping between services
and the business processes they support or enable. In doing so, it provides the basis for improving
operational business efficiency by showing where service improvements are necessary and where
those improvements will have the greatest impact. Centauri uses the Six Sigma quality
management method for continuous improvement.
Information analyzed by Centauri is used by business process owners who are accountable for the
service of the business processes enabled by the IT service. Depending on the implementation, this
data is presented through FuegoBPM or Centauri dashboards to provide a non-technical real-time
view of how IT services are supporting business processes. Although an IT department may be
responsible for IT services, it clearly makes sense for the business process owners ultimately
accountable for a business service to be aware of IT service quality at any given moment. Practical
experience also shows that when organizations do this, steps can be taken in the business arena to
mitigate the consequences of IT problems. For example, if there is disruption in a call center caused
by IT service failure, customer service reps can be instructed to take customer information for
callback. This is infinitely preferable to the all too common response: "the computer system is
down, please call back later".
Provisioning IT Service in the Agile Enterprise
Utility computing, together with grid and on-demand computing, offers a way forward for
organizations looking for agility and is the subject of intense discussion in the IT industry. These
models promote agility and cost reduction through computing models that are very flexible toward
ever-changing requirements from the business. For example, a business may initiate a TV ad
campaign that drives significant volumes of traffic to a Website, which then requires additional
computing resources. Under a utility model, such resources are simply acquired for the duration of
the campaign and then let go when they are no longer needed. Whether these models are pricing
mechanisms for acquiring IT service (e.g., utility) or technical mechanisms for delivering it (e.g.,
grid), their effectiveness will depend on understanding and forecasting business demand for IT
service.
So far in this paper, we have addressed the issue of reducing the risk to the business associated IT
defects. As a result, the effectiveness of the BPM is increased since IT-dependent business
processes are less likely to affected by problems in the IT layer. The solution is achieved by
understanding the mapping between IT service and the business processes it supports and then by
measuring and improving IT service quality in critical-to-quality business areas. Going forward, this
mapping becomes key in on-demand utility computing scenarios where an understanding of the
business demand for IT is necessary to adequately provision IT service. This is best illustrated by
way of an analogy taken from the utility power suppliers (from which the terms "grid" and "utility"
have been borrowed). Although the power companies operate an on-demand model, they pay
significant attention to forecasting consumer demand in order to provision service. Weather
patterns, seasonal consumer habits (e.g., cooking the traditional turkey dinner for Thanksgiving),
and past incidents all become part of service provisioning. The user of the BPM/BSM solution is
likewise able to forecast the business demand for IT service: the BPM environment provides the
volumetric data while the BSM solution translates this into actionable service events. For example, a
retailer opens 50 new stores and uses FuegoBPM to define additional business processes. Based on
the mapping of IT services to business processes, Centauri is able to determine the required service
activity which is in turn passed to the IT provisioning interface for action.
Although utility computing and its variant models are not mainstream technologies, this is clearly a
direction for computing going forward- one where the BPM/BSM user will have a significant
advantage.
Summary
The availability of Centauri services to the FuegoBPM solution designer provides an entirely new way
of managing business processes that are critically dependent on underlying IT services. Just as
FuegoBPM allows the process designer to provide notifications, alerts, and even re-routing of work
because a human participant has missed a process deadline, Centauri adds a new dimension that
can be used to make the process aware of the unavailability or degradation of a critical IT resource.
The process designer can build in proactive responses to this situation, alerting business process
owners as well as IT managers that the process is in trouble. With Centauri, the FuegoBPM designer
has a number of new possibilities:
- Context-sensitive outage alerts. When a critical IT resource becomes unavailable, the
process designer can interrogate Centauri and deliver an alert that conveys the affected
business process (e.g., "claims processing halted"), providing a better understanding of the
business impact of the outage.
- Inclusion of IT participants in business processes. IT participants can be explicitly
included in a business process, allowing them to be instantly alerted when processes are at
risk. In this way, FuegoBPM can be used to alert the specific IT manager and even solicit his
or her input as to whether recovery is expected to be short or lengthy in duration.
- Adapting to IT resource constraints. With FuegoBPM, process designers can provide
robust rollback and backout processes for handling exceptional conditions. By being able to
invoke Centauri services in exception handling routines, process designers can interrogate
the status of key resources and take appropriate action. In the absence of a mail service,
for instance, acknowledgements could be routed to outbound call agents to notify
customers that their order has been received.
BPM is delivering real value to its users, helping organizations improve operational efficiency,
decision making, and move ever closer to becoming real-time enterprises (RTE). Conceptually, BPM
coordinates and balances the dimensions of people, process, organization, and system to design
and orchestrate business processes that deliver real value. In terms of the IT system dimension,
although a wealth of information exists about the status of the IT infrastructure, this data is
meaningful only to IT technicians responsible for operating the service. Therefore, a bridge is
required to translate this data into a form more meaningful to BPM and, in doing so, establish an IT
pillar for BPM.
Centauri Business Service Manager provides this solution. By integrating with a current IT
infrastructure for data collection, it can be quickly and easily layered on top of the tools already in
place. Data about IT components is collected and aggregated to show the overall quality of IT
services and how they support each business process. This data can be forwarded to the BPM to be
incorporated into a BPM dashboard and analyzed.
By combining FuegoBPM and Centauri Business Service Manager, businesses are uniquely able to
tightly link business performance to the quality of their underlying IT infrastructure, allowing them
to make better financial decisions and maximize their return on investment from IT resources.
Going forward, this same perspective will be used as a foundation for provisioning IT services in an
on-demand utility computing environment. Consequently, organizations embracing the BPM/BSM
combination will deliver more robust and effective IT-dependent business processes today and be
able to capitalize quickly on grid computing technologies in the future.
About Proxima Technology
Proxima Technology, Inc. provides software and services to improve
business service and accountability through service-level measurement,
reporting, and problem notification in distributed computing environments.
www.proxima-tech.com
Telephone
Australia 02 9458 1700
Germany 040 32005-405
United Kingdom 0870 870 0732
United States 720 946 7200
©1998-2003 Proxima Technology, Inc., Centauri, and Centauri
Business Service Manager are trademarks of Proxima Technology.
Specifications are subject to change without notice. All other brand or
product names are trademarks of their respective owners.
About Fuego
Fuego provides business process management software to Global
2000 customers who want to improve business performance while
preserving their existing investments in IT. FuegoBPM allows
customers to design, deploy, execute, manage, and improve their
business processes.
www.fuego.com
Telephone United States 972 801 4200
©1999-2004 Fuego, Inc., FuegoBPM is a trademark of Fuego.
Specifications are subject to change without notice. All other
brand or product names are trademarks of their respective
owners.