Oracle 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.

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.