Enterprise Business Management Component

From MIKE2 Methodology

Enterprise Business Management covers 3 major areas. All these technologies are considered advanced capabilities in the area of Information and Process Management. They are focused respectively across process, information and function but tie together streams of each.

Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is focused on the definition, measurement, management and improvement of Business Processes to enable companies to optimise their business. It requires the skills of experienced process modelling and improvement staff. The key differentiator between BPM technologies as opposed to workflow and process automation technologies is their capability to simulate, analyse and improve processes within the tool as part of the development lifecycle. The artefacts from the design and improvement process then become executable code.

Enabling Technologies of the SAFE Architecture#Process Optimisation Process Optimisation is an enabling capability for BPM – the rationale being that if you are not using a BPM tool to optimise processes (as opposed to simply automating them) you are offering limited capability in this area. The SAFE incorporates both of these areas into the overall framework.

Business Activity Monitoring

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) amounts to the convergence of Business Intelligence capabilities and Process Integration. BAM entails assembling the information needed to determine the ‘well being’ of the business (i.e., how many transactions of a given type were there today?, what is the service levels provided to our customers?) in a more process-oriented fashion. BAM solutions represent the evolution of an information platform from a more traditional information environment where we try and establish “what happened” and “when will it happen” to an environment of “what is happening now” and “let’s make this happen”. This can only be enabled through an environment that combines analytical and predictive modelling functionality with a process integration layer, where information is updated continuously and event-based triggering has taken hold.

The SAFE architecture provides the framework required to help business managers make these decisions. An effective BAM Solution can only take hold by first putting in place the Foundation Capabilities that establish the Information Development environment.

Business Rules Engines

Business Rules Engines (BRE) provide a mechanism for defining, centralising, abstracting and implementing business rules that service a distributed environment. Using a rules engine can provide rich functionality such as showing dependencies between business rules, defining rule ownership and associating with applications.

Rules Engines can add substantial benefit in an environment where the rules are complex and when the rules change frequently. As part of the SAFE Architecture framework, business rules can be encapsulated as a service, which can then be made available to other systems across the environment. Profiling tools become important in the discovery of new business rules, as well as in quantitatively measuring their compliance with the existing data set. Business Rules stored within an engine are an important aspect of the metadata content that is integrated the architectural framework.