Business Process Management #

This page covers general terms around the area of Business Processes and Business Process Management. For terms specifically related to CloudSocket and Business Process as a Service refer to this page.

Business Process Management System (BPMS) #

Business Process #

Business Processes are seen as a sequence of manual, semi-automatic and automatic actions with the aim to achieve an organisational goal.

The focus is to align all actions within an organisation with the business goals, independent if they are performed by machines, humans or a group consisting of several machines and / or several humans. Actions are typically described in time, role and place dependent, hence every "hand-over" of a task, or any "reminder" to again come back to a task is seen as the border of an activity.

There is a set of different application field for business processes such as but not limited to quality management, risk management, re-engineering, continues improvement, documentation, training but also model driven architecture and requirement analysis. The first set of application fields have clearly the model as "Information Value Provider" in mind, hence graphical models are not seen as some necessary step to move on to concrete sofware code, but are seen as an independent document type that is necessary to perform day to day work within the organisation. 

The second set of application fields is concerned with, the model driven architecture, software requirement analysis, configuration of software components or software design. In such application scenarios the so-called business and IT alignment must be performed by bridging form the domain centric business process towards the technology centric workflows.

Business Process (ATOS) #

A business process is an activity or set of activities (manual or automated) designed to accomplish a specific organizational goal. These activities can be services that process need to call in order to execute different automatic steps of the whole process. This business process is defined through different standards, as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) or Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN).

Workflow #

Workflows are seen as a sequence of executable software components that are interpreted as a configuration set for a workflow engine, which automatically invokes the sequence of software components.

Business IT-Alignment  #

Business Cloud-IT Alignment #

Business Process Model #

Executable Business Process (FHOSTER) #

Executable model of a flow of structured tasks required produce a specific service, derived from a BPM and enriched with all the information required to be executed by a BPM Engine.

BPM Engine (FHoster) #

The BPM Engine is a server component (no GUI) with its own persistence, that can be used by software clients via an API. The BPM Engine must not be confused with the other components of a business process management suite, like the modeling environment or the end-user workspace client.

An example tool is the ATOS YourBPM server component.

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