This chapter provides an overview of the Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Reference Process Models (RPM) that are delivered with an Oracle AIA release, and describes our understanding of Business Process Management (BPM).
For a complete list of the models delivered with an Oracle AIA release, see My Oracle Support article ID 824633.1 entitled Oracle Application Integration Architecture 2.0.1 - 11gR1x: List of Delivered Reference Process Models: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=824633.1.
This chapter includes the following sections:
BPM includes a set of activities that organizations perform to either optimize their business processes or adapt them to new organizational needs.
Important elements include business process modeling and analysis (BPA), orchestration (BPEL), and business activity monitoring (BAM).
This guide focuses on the BPA element, outlines Oracle's approach and methodology, and describes the business process models delivered with an Oracle AIA release.
Coordinating business processes is not simple or linear as might be portrayed in the world of traditional task management.
Business is constantly changing, messy, unordered and chaotic; work activities and tasks have to be processed in parallel.
Coordination requires the spawning and asynchronous execution of nested tasks and parallel activities.
And it is not just tasks that occur in parallel, but decision-making, distributed computation and the movement of information within the company and across the value chain.
The best way to understand how your business is running is to understand your processes.
The first step in doing that is to model your business processes.
Oracle has created and delivered business process models for those processes supported by Oracle AIA releases. These business process models will enable you to see and understand how Oracle AIA provides application integration solutions for your business processes.
A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, involving both human and system interactions, that will lead to accomplishing a set of specific organizational goals. Characteristics of business processes include the following:
Large, complex, long running.
Widely distributed and customized.
Dynamic.
Automated.
Both business and technical in nature.
Cross boundaries within and between businesses.
Dependent on and supportive of human intelligence and judgment.
Difficult to recognize.