Oracle BPM Suite 12c – new business architecture features

New tools in Oracle BPM Suite 12c put BPM in the mold of business architecture (BA). This new version contains new BA model types and features that help companies to move out of the IT-based, rather technical view of business processes automation and into strategic process improvement. Thus, these new model types help us to embark on the journey towards enterprise BPM.

This is an interesting step in evolution of enterprise middleware—Oracle is the first vendor of a business process automation engine that moved up from concrete automated processes to strategic views on end-to-end processes, thus crossing the automation/strategic barrier.

BPM Suite 12c introduces cross-departmental business process views. Thereby, it allows us to approach an enterprise modeling exercise through top-down modeling. It has become an end-to-end value chain model that sits on top of processes. It chains separated business processes together into one coherent end-to-end view.

The value chain describes a bird's-eye view of the steps needed to achieve the most critical business goals of an organization. These steps comprise of business processes, of which some are automated in a BPMN engine and others actually run in packaged applications or are not automated at all. Also, BPM Suite 12c allows the capturing of the respective goals and provides the tools to measure them as KPIs and service-level agreements.

In order to understand the path towards these yet untackled areas, it is important to understand where we stand today with BPM and what this new field of end-to-end process transparency is all about. Yet, before we get there, we will leave enterprise IT for a moment and take a look at the nature of a game (any game) in order to prepare for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and cultural impact that underpin the move from a departmental to an enterprise approach to BPM.