August 2005
Intermediate to advanced
350 pages
10h 29m
English
Content preview from Essential Business Process ModelingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Summary
The main points of this chapter include the following:
A business process is the step-by-step algorithm to achieve a business objective. The best visualization of a business process is a flowchart. A process can actually be executed by a process engine, provided its logic is defined precisely and unambiguously. When a process definition is input to an engine, the engine can run instances of the process. The steps of the process are called activities. Business process modeling (BPM) is the study of the design and execution of processes.
BPM is concerned only with process-oriented applications. Not all enterprise applications qualify. The process-oriented acid test of an application is whether it is long-lived and defined at a given time by its state. The example travel agency application passes the test because of it manages itinerary state. OLTP applications, such as ATMs, fail because they lack longevity and state.
BPM, because of various competing standards (BPEL4WS, BPML, and BPMN; WSCI, WfMC specifications), vendors (IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Staffware, See Beyond, Vitria, and others), and even computer science underpinnings (pi-calculus, Petri nets), is a maze that confounds many onlookers. This book attempts to discover, through the confusion, an elegant, process-oriented application architecture.
Among the benefits of BPM are the formalization of current processes and the occasion for reengineering, greater efficiency, increased productivity and decreased head count, the ability ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.