Oracle BPM

Three most memorable things about OOW 2009 (at least for some of us):

1. Strong storms, highly unusual for October, that got many of us completely drenched
2. Earthquake, which though not very severe was eerie coming 4 days before the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake
3. BPM !!

BPM was featured very prominently in both Thomas Kurian's keynote and Hasan Rizvi's general session "Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation."

Mark Peterson writes Oracle spotlights BPM in Fusion Middleware Story :

During the Oracle Open World 2009 General Session "Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation" we heard about SOA, the Enterprise 2.0 Portal and Tuxedo; but what is that? We were given a demo of the new Oracle BPM 11g application development environment. We got to see swim-lanes, process models, simulations and dash-boards. They showed how you can obtain process model metrics and key performance indicators for your process. They made significant improvements over the way BPM integrates with applications and systems.

We also saw significant customer interest - our sessions and labs were well attended and well received, our demo pods were heavily visited, and many of us had back-to-back customer meetings throughout OOW.

In addition to the positive feedback we received in person, many have blogged positively - following is a quick compilation:

Jim Sinur writes Oracle BPM 11g R1 Suite is Well Thought Through:

Oracle wants to engage the business user in BPM. With that as goal, Oracle has set out to have a more business friendly BPM experience at several levels. First the modeling environment is greatly improved, secondly the BAM environment is usable plus somewhat seamless and finally the integrated rules environment is finally usable by non-IT types.
...
If Oracle BPM 11g R1 works as advertised (to be determined), Oracle is ahead of the other power vendors.

Mark Peterson writes the wait was worth it:

For businesses, the need for a rich user-experience has been achieved. The BPM studio is integrated with the ADF development environment; a JSF-based technology. ...
BPM 11g has also improved on the type of roles available for activities. You can now specify interactive tiers for approval or review activities. ...
BPM 11g has many other features as well. It has a state-of-the-art rules engine. It can handle most business rules and conditional requirements without the need to integrate third-party rules engines. It has a new milestone activity switch to enhance business activity monitoring and instance processing by the workspace. It also has integrated Oracle BAM to enhance the ability to obtain information about the business process.

Jason Jones writes based on the hands-on-lab:

The result is an impressive combination of Oracle's latest SOA technologies with the business process modeling...
Another impressive feature is Process Composer, which is a lightweight web-based modeler to modify processes for less technical users...

Todd Biske provides an excellent summary of the BPM 11 session:

Overall, the message is that Oracle has a comprehensive and unified BPM platform. From the slides, it certainly appears comprehensive. The 11g release is all about unification onto a common platform, and as long as what's been on the slides accurately reflects this new platform, 11g should be a good step forward for Oracle BPM.

Mike Van Alst writes:

Always good to go out with a bang, so I've saved the best for last. With the introduction of BPM 11g comes the Process Composer. This is an web-based tool aimed at the business users, where they are able to modify any process before it's deployed. Based on available rules, services and process activities, they can modify the process to their needs. This will make imtroduction of new products (based on a default process) an undertaking that can be handled purely by the business, without the need for IT.

To sum it up, in Mark Peterson's words - the wait was worth it!

Last Monday, October 12th, at OOW '09, Bhagat and I presented - "Next-Generation Oracle Business Process Platform: Dynamic and Collaborative". The session ID for this was S308348. Following is a brief synopsis of the presentation. You can find the presentation here.

We broke down the presentation by following themes:

Business User Empowerment
What we are finding is that many of our customers are beginning to require business to specify their processes at greater detail and with more precise semantics as well as to capture the metrics that they want to measure, monitor, and analyze.

To facilitate, business getting into the driver seat we have been making significant enhancements:

Business friendly BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation to enable business analysts to easily and graphically create BPMN 2.0 process models, define the organizational model supporting it including roles and calendars, to create various simulation scenarios and run them, and to define business indicators and metrics.

While business friendliness of these tools is important, equally important is the support for BPMN 2.0 standard. In BPMN 2.0, for the first time we have a standard that not only enables business to model processes with precise semantics but also can be executed without any translations. We have seen that standards facilitate skill development and foster adoption and we strongly believe and our customers agree that BPMN 2.0 will address the issue of what skills business needs to have to get into the BPM driver seat.

Business user empowerment also requires that business be able to author and manage the policies and rules surrounding the process. In this regard, we have significantly enhanced business rules authoring including adding support for Decision Tables, a spreadsheet like metaphor that is easy to visualize and conceptualize and also supports overlap and completeness tests.

The other features in this context are:

• Zero-code IT development environment, leveraging the SOA composite editor, that enables an IT person to leverage the breadth of Oracle's SOA capabilities and expose them to business analysts in a business friendly catalog
• Rich forms leveraging ADF that not only provides a visual design environment but also allows composing data from multiple sources including back-end applications, BI, etc. and render them using highly interactive UI and visualization elements. Also, for those who do not want to do any UI work we automatically generate 100% ready to use forms.
• BPA Suite for enabling business architects and enterprise architects to model the complete business context around the process. In BPA 11gR1, which we shipped in August, we made many enhancements that you can read about here.

Collaborative BPM
With our existing products, our customers have built rich collaborative process portals that enable different stakeholders to collaborate, manage schedules, prioritize, etc. In BPM 11g, we will be taking this to the next level by providing out of the box collaborative process spaces built leveraging Web Center spaces. The three primary use cases are:

• Modeling space to facilitate collaboration around process discovery, modeling, and optimization
• Work space enabling end-users to leverage the power of Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities as they work on their BPM processes and tasks
• Instance specific space, where a collaboration space can be automatically created as part of a process instance with the right community provisioned and documents and discussions scoped to the process instance

Also, we are introducing Guided Business Processes, an innovative metaphor very similar to one used by most Tax preparation software, to help the end user navigate through a process.

Dynamic BPM
Many of our customers are using BPM to run some of their most sophisticated processes, which tend to be very dynamic in nature. We have always had very rich dynamic capabilities, including:

• Business rules driven process flows
• Business rules driven dynamic service binding
• Business rules driven task management including re-routing, delegation, load balancing, etc.

There is a nuanced enhancement we are making, that will be significant to customers who need that level of dynamism. Instead of doing a rule execution at a fixed point in the process and then driving flow based on it, we can now dynamically invoke rules as end users take actions and change the routing based on it.

We are also adding a web based Process Composer that allows business users to customize BPMN 2.0 processes; if the changes are confined to services, rules, tasks available in the business catalog, the customized process is deployment ready. This new feature has been getting great reviews and this concise description does not do it justice - however, plan to blog on this later as a separate topic.

While the above provides comprehensive support for anticipated changes, many times we need to deal with changes on the fly. For dealing with such unanticipated changes, we have always allowed appropriately privileged person to reassign, delegate, or re-route processes. While this enabled change to the process at the current point of execution, we now are adding more power - an appropriately privileged user can review the currently determined routing (what we sometime call as future approvers) and make changes at any step in the routing.

Intelligent BPM
Some of our customers do what we call "Intelligent BPM" - essentially, insight-driven actions and insightful actions. You can read more about this here.

An enhancement we are doing in this area is to allow business indicators and metrics to be captured along with the process model and for them to drive analytics and BAM dashboards.

Also, while BI provides a rear-view mirror and BAM provides a cock-pit view, we now also have Complex Event Processing that can act as a crystal ball, looking for patterns in events and using them to sense interesting events.

Unified and Comprehensive BPM Platform
A major theme for us is a comprehensive and unified BPM platform. Our customers tell us that the situation they have today, where they have multiple BPM products, and make determinations on the product to use based on the project requirements, is not sustainable. They invariably run into issues as the project's needs evolve and start stretching the parameters of the original assessment. Also, such fragmented and siloed architecture prevents end-to-end process management and monitoring.

One of the big benefits of our emphasis on unification is that we are able to provide same level of performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability across different process scenarios. Particularly interesting is the area of manageability; in this regard, some of the capabilities are:

• Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control for top down technical monitoring that provides comprehensive view of the topology and engine components
• End-to-end flow race and instance tracking through the various components a process instance may flow through
• Unified error hospital which provides for a rich policy based exception handling
• Unified policy management for managing security and other policies consistently across the stack

While this has been a rather large posting, due to the scope covered, it touches upon a lot of things but does not explain them in detail. Watch out this blog for future postings diving into various aspects touched upon in this post. Again, the presentation described in this blog is here.

We had a very successful hand-on-lab (HOL) for BPM Suite 11g at OOW 2009. Some of the features touched upon at this lab are:

• BPM Studio - BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation unified into Oracle stack while preserving its business friendliness
• Rich Forms - Rich forms including screen flow trains and drag-and-drop leveraging ADF
• Dynamic BPM - Business administrator having the ability to view the approval chain and override it
• Process Composer - Web based BPMN 2.0 editor including a business catalog of pre-wired and pre-configured components for business user customization of processes

Many of you asked for a copy of the lab, which being a green company, we were not handing out. While it will be posted on the OOW content site, we have also posted it here.

Please use the comments section to provide us feedback.

If you missed the lab on Sunday, we are repeating it on:

Monday at 11:30 AM in Hilton Hotel, Continental Ballroom 5.

11:45 a.m.               Hands-on Introduction to Oracle Business Process Management 11                                        Hilton Hotel, Continental Ballroom 5

11:30 a.m.               Hands-on Introduction to Oracle Business Process Management 11                                        Hilton Hotel, Continental Ballroom 5

1:00 p.m.                 Next-Generation Oracle Business Process Platform: Dynamic and Collaborative                    Marriott, Nob Hill CD

11:30 a.m.               EA, BPM, and SOA: Bridging the Information Gap, Using Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite           Moscone South 304

1:00 p.m.                 Maximizing Success with the SOA/BPM Center of Excellence at Nordea                                    Marriott Hotel Salon 1

2:30 p.m.                 BPM Roundtable: Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Maximizing Success                      Marriott Salon 12/13

4:00 p.m                  Using BPM and BI to Pave the Way Toward Government Transformation                                 Moscone West L3 Room 3003

5:30 p.m                  Strategically Leveraging BPM and SOA in Your Oracle IT Strategy                                             Marriott Hotel Salon 1

5:30 p.m                  Using Oracle BPEL Process Manager with Enterprise Content Management                            Moscone South 200

1:00 p.m.                 Reference Architecture and Methodology Aspects for SOA-Enabled BPM Adoption                Moscone South 310

1:00 p.m.                 Automating the Quote-to-Cash Process in the Logistics Service Provider Industry                 InterContinental B

5:00 p.m.                 Realizing the BPM Vision of Agility and Streamlined Applications Through Methodology     Moscone South 309

10:30 a.m.               New Features in Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Workflow 11g                               Hilton Hotel Yosemite A

1:15 p.m.                 New Features in Oracle Business Rules 11g                                                                                  Hilton Hotel Yosemite B

2:30 p.m.                 Best Practices for Business Process Modeling                                                                             Hilton Hotel Yosemite B

1:00 p.m.                 Best Practices for Oracle Business Process Management Deployments                                    Hilton Hotel Yosemite A

11:45 a.m.               Hands-on Lab: Hands-on Introduction to Oracle Business Process Management 11              Hilton Hotel Continental Ballroom 5

3:45 p.m.                 Hands-on Lab: Introduction to Business Rules and Human Workflow in Oracle SOA Suite 11g Hilton Hotel Continental Ballroom 5

11:30 a.m.               Hands-on Lab: Hands-on Introduction to Oracle Business Process Management 11              Hilton Hotel Continental Ballroom 5

11:30 a.m.               Hands-on Lab: Introduction to Business Rules and Human Workflow in Oracle SOA Suite 11g Hilton Hotel Continental Ballroom 5

You can also find more complete list of sessions, labs, partner booths etc. related to BPM in the Focus on Oracle Business Process Management document.

Hope to see you in Frisco next week. Have a great OpenWorld !

In August, we released BPA Suite 11g. This week we did an official press release - you can read it here.

Some of the enhancements in 11g highlighted in this press release are:

• Unified ARIS Server and ARIS Repository: enables seamless sharing of process and related metadata across Oracle BPA Suite and other ARIS platform products such as ARIS IT Architect and ARIS Balanced Scorecard.
• Round-trip integration with Oracle SOA 11g platform: enables business and IT to work from shared metadata and automatically translate process models into SCA-based SOA composites to promote rapid and meaningful process development. These features can eliminate business to IT gaps by directly translating business requirements into executable processes, empowering both business and IT to make process level changes in a governed fashion.
• Service discovery and identification: offers integration with UDDI and WSIL repositories to promote process based service discovery.
• Enhanced reporting: delivers new simulation reports that provide greater process visibility. The new graphical Report Editor simplifies report building and enables users to create customized, targeted process analysis options and result presentations quickly.
• New Version and Change Management: offers built-in support for versioning of process artifacts and change control. Version Management provides optimal process documentation support, making it possible to track the history of process descriptions and the improvement process. The Change Management feature helps to add and track improvement proposals for continuous process refinements.

Also, recently at Aris Process World, Ashish Mohindroo recorded an interview highlighting how IDS and Oracle together enable rapid conversion from business concepts to implementation. You can watch it here.

While BPM and BI are each very useful and powerful technologies in their own right, using them together opens new frontiers of intelligent processes. Matt Miller, Head of Business Analysis and Testing at Motability Operations, and Mark Simpson, an Oracle ACE Director and leader of the SOA technology practice for Griffiths Waite, recently published an article on this topic - Building Intelligent Processes with Insight-Driven Agility - leveraging the case study for Insight Processes for Vehicle Remarketing at Motability.

Some of the concepts highlighted in this article are:

• Actionable Insight - launching processes based on BI insights and from BI dashboards. For example if BI shows a channel under capacity, launching a business process for changing allocation rules
• Insightful Action - two flavors of this are highlighted in this article:
1. Process and Business Rule leveraging the context available from BI to automatically adjust to optimal behavior
2. Human participants in the process having access to BI dashboards and reports at the point of taking decisions, such as within a BPM task

Another interesting use case of BPM and BI together that is not discussed in this article is how BI can be used to analyze processes and identify process improvements. Let us know if you have a good story to share in this regard.

Happy reading! Again, the article is here.

BPMN 2.0 has hit a major milestone with the final submission on June 22nd 2009. It passed 4 key votes and is all set to become the OMG “alpha” specification in Fall 2009. The BMI Task Force, the OMG Architecture Board and the DTC have reviewed and overwhelmingly approved the final submission. Notably, the BMI Task Force passed the “vote to vote” motion 23 to 0 thereby waiving the extended review period and setting up an immediate adoption vote which they then approved on the same day.

The approval of the June 22nd submission does not mean that BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted but it is significant because the tool vendors can start developing using BPMN 2.0. The specification is pretty much frozen at this point from a feature/functionality perspective and the main focus now is fixing bugs. This is also significant from another aspect as it is the first submission post the merger of the two BPMN teams, the BPMN IOS team (led by IBM, Oracle and SAP) and the BPMN for Services (BPMN-S) team. You can refer to David Frankel's blog to understand the history behind the two teams here:

You can refer to the BPMN20 final submission webcast for a good understanding of the BPMN 2.0 final specification.

There is also an excellent book on BPMN 2.0 by BPMN expert Bruce Silver titled “BPMN Method and Style” available now at Amazon.com he has also blogged about BPMN here.

So what's next?

• The general membership vote will take 6-8 weeks (it's conducted via email). When the vote is done, the OMG Board of Directors will formally adopt the submission as an OMG "alpha spec". This will most likely happen around Fall 2009.

• The specification then enters finalization phase, primarily a debugging phase during which feedbacks/experiences from implementation vendors are analyzed and incorporated prior to final standardization.

• The Finalization Task Force (FTF) has been created to take the specification to final standardization and consists of members from various companies such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, Red Hat, PNA, France Telcom, BAE Systems, Lombardi Software, BizAgi etc. The co-chairs for the FTF are Mariano Benitez from Oracle, Ivana Trickovic from SAP and Steve White from IBM. The FTF is expected to take up to a year to complete.

• The BPMN 2.0 specification changes from alpha to beta when the FTF publishes its first draft.

Dates to watch out for :

Beta Specification Publication: 01 September, 2009
Comments Due: 1 March, 2010
Report Due Date: 24 May, 2010
Report Deadline: 21 June, 2010

As one of the original supporters and early implementers of BPMN 2.0, Oracle is pleased to see the specification evolve to meet the needs of technical and business level users. As part of our commitment to open standards, we continue to be invested in this and will be actively engaged in the finalization task force, with Mariano being one of the co-chairs. With our support of BPMN, we are making it easier for business and IT to collaborate throughput the process life-cycle and to seamlessly bridge the business strategy to implementation gap.

Watch this space for more updates on BPMN 2.0……………………….

- Meera Srinivasan,
Senior Principal Product Manager,
Oracle BPM
meera.srinivasan@oracle.com

Oracle Business Process Management 10gR3 Maintenance Pack 1 Announcement

Summary

We are proud to release Oracle Business Process Management (OBPM) 10gR3 Maintenance Pack 1 (MP1). This release resolves several issues identified as critical for a successful operation of BPM projects.

It is strongly recommended that all customers running OBPM GA upgrade to OBPM MP1. This new release will also address several problems identified in Proof of Concepts during the last months that were delivered as Patches for OBPM 10gR3 GA.

This new release includes several bug corrections as well as introducing some new certifications that are outlined below. Please check the interoperability matrix included in the Release Notes.

1. Highlights of OBPM 10gR3 MP1

The following is a brief summary of the highlights of this release. More specific information can be found in the Release Notes archives associated to the OBPM 10gR3 MP1 binaries available at OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bpm/index.html

• Oracle BPM Enterprise 10gR3 is certified to run on WebSphere 6.1.0.19 single node and cluster configurations.
• Oracle BPM Enterprise 10gR3 is certified to run with WCI Suite 10gR3 to expose the WorkSpace through the WCI Portal (formerly known as ALUI Portal).
• Complete migration from Oracle BPM 6.0 Collaboration Edition environments to Oracle BPM 10gR3 environments. Please check Known Issues for a couple of related issues to be addressed soon in a HF.
• Provide documentation updates on new features.
• OBPM WorkSpace Performance improvements.
• OBPM BPM Object Presentation Editor performance improvements.

1.1. New features or improvements in this release

There are no new features introduced in OBPM 10gR3 MP1.

1.2. Major Bug corrections added in this release

For a detailed list of issues corrected and addressed as well as a list of known issues, please check the Release Notes published on the OBPM 10gR3 Documentation Pages: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13154_01/bpm/docs65/relnotes/release_notes_OracleBPM10gR3.htm

1.3. New certifications

The following are the new certifications included in this release:
• IBM WebSphere 6.1.0.19 to deploy all OBPM Web Applications and Engine WebSphere.
• Oracle Web Center Interaction Suite 10gR3 (to support Collaboration Edition Deployments in conjunction with WCI (formerly known as: ALUI).

2. Applies to the following OBPM Product Components and version:

• OBPM Studio 10gR3 GA
• OBPM Enterprise Standalone 10gR3 GA
• OBPM Enterprise for WebLogic 10gR3 GA

3. Download Instructions

Only new installers are provided for OBPM 10gR3 MP1 at OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/bpm/index.html. Upgrade packages can be obtained from OBPM Support (http://albpmsupport.bea.com). These upgrade packages can be used to upgrade an existing OBPM 10gR3 GA installation with only the deltas.

This weekend I was watching The Love Guru, where Guru Pitka (Mike Meyers) is a self help guru working on people’s relationship issues with a set of clichés. It occurs to me that some of his concepts - into-me-I-see and the only way out is in - applies to the business IT collaboration issue too.

When talking about business IT collaboration issues we usually focus on the lack of agility introduced by misinterpretation of requirements issues. These are nicely addressed by Oracle BPM and BPA by empowering the business to drive the modeling.

However, is this sufficient? Of course not every model that business draws can be implemented. What then makes the difference between process improvements that are actionable and those that are not? Bernard Pech, who used to be CTO at Siebel, used to say that design is about giving form to space bounded by constraints. As is implied, the starting point of a valid design is having understanding of the constraints. Or as Guru Pitka would put it - the only way out is in!

This is where BPA Suite excels. You can model your entire enterprise including your systems, products, services, etc. so that business and IT share a common view of the capabilities and the constraints. This helps business model processes that are viable. Also, when business understands the constraints, it helps correct prioritization of projects to remediate the constraints impacting critical business objectives.

The above picture shows some of the model types that can be captured in Oracle BPA Suite to model the whole ecosystem around and supporting the processes.

Watch out for more posts and webinars elaborating on this concept of enterprise modeling and its importance to BPM.   

Last month BPM 10gR3 became generally available. Although it is a bit of old news by now, what better news to start this blog with!

As you may know, BPM is the ALBPM product we acquired from BEA; the 10gR3 release is what is commonly referred to as the 100 day release for BEA acquired products.

However, it is a lot more than that. Before acquisition, BEA was planning a 6.1 release. At Oracle, we continued to invest - this release added so many enhancements that we were planning on calling it 6.5, before settling on 10gR3, as a consistent release number across the stack.

Some of my personal favorite enhancements are:

• Significantly enhanced BPMN modeling
• Richer, more flexible, and more productive workspace application

• Personal dashboards
• WYSIWYG forms and dashboard editor

Alex blogged about the ten reasons why this is a must consider release.

Also, watch this blog for more posts on the specifics of the exciting new and enhanced features in this release.