Ad-Hoc BPM - the edge of process & collaboration.

Hi,

AquaLogic BPM Suite provides several ways to support ad-hoc interactions inside and outside of a process, especially interactions that can not be easily mapped to a business process flow. I am talking about the activities that happen at the very edge of process space in the collaboration space.

Below is a graphical representation of this notion. Jesper Joergensen, one of my colleagues created this image for a presentation during BEA World and it demonstrates very nicely the interaction between processes and external collaboration activities that take place in order to complete a task.

 

So for example when you call Bob in Finance and ask him about the budget planning for next year, or when you talk to Mary about collaborating on an internal product review, you are in fact solving a task in a process. The ability to connect all these interactions and map them to a business process flow can be difficult to represent - some level of support is needed to make this possible. So next time when you do talk with Bob about the budget plan you could tie the interaction with a LiveSpace where the information related to the process can be collected and made available to other participants in the process. Another great example is the integration we have available with ALUI and WLP portals. You can surface process information, more specifically via ALUI, you get all the benefits of a deeper collaboration integration.

We should also include the new generation of BEA Social Computing products like AquaLogic Pages and see how easy it is to create a new ad-hoc collaboration space and connect with ALBPM via RSS in just a few clicks. A very interesting posting from Shane Pearson can give you more insight on how these new technologies are increasingly playing a role in the enterprise. You can leverage all the latest BEA Social Computing technologies today with your BPM project.

In closing, ALBPM has a variety of ways to connect with end users, both inside and outside of a process. It also provides support for ad-hoc interactions that take place in order to complete a particular task. As always, I would like to thank you for all your feedback and recommendations, keep them coming to us. If you are new to BPM when you get a moment take AquaLogic BPM Suite for a spin and let us know what you think.

Cheers,

--alex



Technorati tags: BPM Business Process Management SOA BEA Java WS Web Services Social Computing