The purpose of this page on Business Process Management (BPM) is to give a brief overview of BPM from a business director perspective.
It is recommended to read our blog page on SOA before reading this page on BPM.
Business Process Management (BPM) comprise a set of tools for designing, orchestrating and managing business processes.
Typically these business processes are composed of a number of Web services (where each Web service delivers some functionality from an installed application some where within the internal IT systems or externally from the Cloud or other business partners) and human tasks and activities.
Depending on the type of BPM tools used, it is possible to use a visual modelling tool to create graphical models of the services and human activities that comprise the business process that is to be modelled. Once the desired new capabilities (e.g. new services or human tasks) have been added to a business process model it is possible to automatically convert the business process model into executable code to run on a business process server with only minimal additional programming effort.
Using BPM to create composite applications
BPM business process models enhances agility because they can be quickly changed and deployed, to reflect required changes to business processes in response to external and internal requirements without expensive software coding.