IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems, Second Edition

12. Implementing Business Processes

Understanding business processes is key to implementation design. This chapter explains why. We expect most readers of this book will have either a technical background or an application design background. Earlier chapters probably cover a lot of material that is familiar to the techies; this chapter will in part be familiar to the application modelers.

Business process modeling was late coming into the mainstream of IT application design. Until recently, functional analysis was much more common (see the box entitled “Function versus process” at the end of this chapter). In the mid 1990s and earlier, few design methods paid more than lip service to business process modeling. It was only when the Hammer and ...