Art of Software Reuse

I have been stressing the need for integrating various concepts for succeeding with systematic reuse. BPM is no different. In an earlier post I introduced reusable BPM integration capabilities. In this post I want to list additional capabilities that you can build as part of BPM initiatives:

• Mature your integration function that helps consumers integrate, use, and discover business process assets. This includes activities, sub-processes, as well as end-to-end business processes. Provide sample source as well as integration documentation to applications that need to leverage your processes. Do remember developers may not understand the differences in interacting with a stateful business process!
• Significant alignment with information architecture logical model. Your activities that invoke system steps leverage logical data schemas and data types. If you start to reuse sub-processes within your high-level flows this will become second nature.
• Ensure that your BPM assets are aligned with key performance indicators (KPIs) – if your business wants to analyze time taken between a particular set of steps you might need to persist, report, compute on this data. Why not use a reusable component that can persist updates from any business process?
• Business process models and orchestrations developed are more standards compliant and adhere to key BPM and SOA standards. The higher the interoperability of SOA assets, the easier it is to reuse them in your business processes.
• Expand coverage of business processes hosted in the BPM layer – including processes that involve internal clients, external clients, data governance/compliance etc. You will start identify reusable assets over time. For example, two business processes might require fetching customer data or updating customer address or calculate customer worth to the company and so on. Every such need is an opportunity for reuse.
• Comprehensive modeling and representation of all relevant business processes including placeholders for manual steps, batch jobs, etc. Even if your existing process isn’t transformed completely from manual to one that is fully automated in real-time identify these steps explicitly. At the very least, you can use reusable components that deal with batch jobs (kick off FTP session or create a temporary file and copy to a particular location etc.)
• Expanded number of event driven services for your business process. The higher the number of events the greater the likelihood of additional consuming applications getting to reuse data and notifications.
• Support standardized alerts associated with human workflow steps (delegation, escalation, routing, pause/resume task etc.). Your BPM infrastructure can provide configurable capabilities for these steps.
• Create scripts that perform continuous integration including smoke tests, unit tests, performance tests etc. If your business process are service-enabled, you can run a battery of service requests to instantiate, update, remove process instances.

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