Business Process Management
From AMWA
Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.
Business processes orchestrate the execution of business services to implement enterprise functions as specified in the business model (see Orchestration). They are usually associated with operational objectives and business goals, in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs collected as part of the process implementation are usually used to evaluate effectiveness of the enterprise functions. (See also Monitoring Software).
When necessary, business processes can be decomposed in a set of subprocesses orchestrated by a main process, and so on in a recursive way. From the point of view of SOA, all those processes and subprocesses are considered to be services. So the real difference between that type of service and other “atomic” services is that business processes correspond to implementation artifacts that change often, as opposed to atomic services which correspond to fairly stable artifacts.
From a technology point of view, business processes are modeled and implemented with tools and languages that ideally can be understood both by business people and by IT people.
