Chapter 2. Modeling Business Processes for SOA
Modeling business processes is a part of the overall business process management. Business process management (BPM) is a very important discipline, which is closely related to the operating efficiency and competitive position of a company, and its ability to grow. Business processes are also very well connected with IT. Today, IT is the driver of business processes. Imagine how any company would operate if the IT system is turned off for a week or even a day. You will quickly see that IT has become the engine that drives business processes.
SOA provides huge opportunities to better align business processes with IT and applications. To be able to achieve this, we have to understand the role of business process modeling and BPM in SOA.
In this chapter, we will:
- Discuss the role of SOA and BPM, and understand the business process life cycle
- Focus on business process modeling for SOA and discuss the methodologies and notations used
- Understand the process design and the results of process design such as process map, roles, relations, and so on
- Discuss process simulation
- Understand modeling principles
- Identify common problems in process modeling
- Discuss the process implementation phase and understand the role of SOA
- See an overview of process execution and control
- Discuss Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
- Briefly discuss process optimization, key performance indicators, and typical problems in process optimization