4 Keys for Effectively Utilizing Cloud-based BPM | Business Process ...

4 Keys for Effectively Utilizing Cloud-based BPM

July 26th, 2012

Shariq Ata (@shariq)

As more and more businesses move processes to the Cloud, SaaS (read CRM, ERP, Billing, etc) is fast becoming a commodity service. Today, businesses are increasingly looking at ?BPM in the Cloud? as a vehicle to distinguish themselves in the global competitive market. While organizations view SaaS as a quick and less capital intensive way to access and store data, they also want to harmoniously orchestrate and monitor their Business Processes across SaaS (Cloud) and home grown (on-premise) solutions.

In the crowded world of Cloud-based BPM, many vendors claim to deliver simplicity, ease of process automation and cost efficiency. But a close look under the marketing veneer reveals that many vendors are just reinventing and relabeling the same old as new. Therefore, it is important to understand the key attributes of any robust enterprise-class BPM offerings in the Cloud that gives you true competitive advantage.
Here is a quick checklist worth pondering before you embark on your next enterprise BPM project in the Cloud.

  1. BPM alone is not enough, a comprehensive platform is needed and it includes:
    1. SOA -based integration bus to rapidly integrate disparate systems in the cloud and on-premise through rich set of connectors
    2. Business Rules Engine to support dynamic business rules as a web service that can either be invoked as standalone or embedded? into a business process
    3. Mashup composer to quickly create a single view of customer, product, order across multiple distributed backend systems
    4. Business Activity Monitoring capability to monitor both operational and business related SLAs, KPIs, etc
    5. Multi-browser support for both the end user and the developer. In other words, a true browser-based IDE where a geographically distributed team can collaborate to model, deploy and monitor the processes
    6. Multi-tenancy as a part of its? architectural DNA to securely segregate the business process, data, business rules and key organizational specific artifacts
    7. A Cloud-based business service enablement and provisioning
  2. Best-of-breed is no longer an option in the brave new world of cloud:
    The need of the hour is a homogenously integrated stack where each component is fully integrated to build an end-to-end solution. In the Cloud world, summoning SMEs from various stacks in a room to pin-point the problem in the production system is no longer an option.
  3. The solution must adhere to the industry standards:
    Cloud is all about seamless interaction between many systems and technology therefore it has to adhere to the industry standards.
  4. Ability to take advantage of the cloud elasticity :
    This can be achieved by automatically adding new BPM nodes when certain CPU/memory thresholds are reached.

Remember, not all BPM Vendors are created equal.? Adhering to these four guidelines will help ensure that you select a vendor that offers a comprehensive, simple and robust platform that supports business agility and gives you a clear competitive advantage.

Author Spotlight

Shariq Ata

(@shariq),

Shariq Ata is Vice President Professional Services at Cordys. He holds responsibility for deployment, project management and technical support in the US.

Source: http://blog.cordys.com/4-keys-for-effectively-utilizing-cloud-based-bpm/

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