iTechNote

In this presentation, Oliver Sharp talks about Microsoft’s business process management (BPM) system. The presentation gives a nice overview of what is BPM? what is Microsoft BPM? and what is coming to Microsoft BPM?

What kind of process do we normally see in business? The processes range from very loose to the extremely rigid. Oliver Sharp classifies the processes into four categories depending on the level of complexity and rigidity. They are Individual Ad hoc, Human Semi Structured, System Highly Structured and Fixed Process.

• Individual Ad hoc: email, instant messaging, personal task list
• Human Semi Structured: document approval, vacation approval
• System Highly Structured: expense reporting, management dashboard
• Fixed Process: extending LOB applications, supply-chain

All these processes need to be actively managed using BPM solution. Microsoft Office and SharePoint are the core products in the solution to Individual Ad hoc and Human Semi Structured type of processes. Microsoft BizTalk Server fulfills the requirements of a process server that is normally required in the highly structured processes (System Highly Structured and Fixed Process).

Microsoft BPM solution unifies the currently fragmented market of BPM. There is a lot of jargon you would hear in this space such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business to Business (B2B), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Human Workflow, Business Modeling & Simulation and Event Driven Architecture.

Regardless of what we call them, the fundamental objective of BPM is “how do we help people take one system, get it to talk to another over an arbitrary set of messaging topologies and then build applications that extend across heterogeneous systems.”

The presentation also introduces a worthy of a note metaphor of comparing process tier and data tier.