Ruminating on BPM vs Case Management

Most BPM tools today support both BPMN (business process modeling notation) as well as CMMN (Case Management Modeling Notation). But when to use what?

It all depends on the process that you want to model. Given below are some tips that can be used to decide whether to model the process as a traditional BPM or a case management solution.

Traditional BPM: 

• If your process is a predefined and ordered sequence of tasks - e.g. sending out a insurance renewal message, onboarding an employee, etc. 
• The order of the steps rarely change - i.e. the process is repeatable.
• Business users cannot dynamically change the process. The process determines the sequence of events. 

Case Management:

• When the process does not have a strict ordering of steps - e.g. settling a claim.
• The process depends on the knowledge worker, who decides the next steps. 
• External events (submission of documents) determine what next step the knowledge worker will take.  
• Case management empowers knowledge workers and provides them with access to all the information concerning the case. The knowledge worker then uses his discretion and control to move the case towards the next steps. 

Using the above guidelines, you can model your process using BPMN or CMMN. Business rules can be modeled as DMN (decision modeling notation). 

Cool online browser based BPMN, DMN and CMMN editor

If you are looking for an extremely lightweight BPMN tool then please try out https://bpmn.io
It is made by the team at Camunda BPM and I was pleased with the simplicity of use.

The JS based tool also provides an UI editor for DMN (Decision Model Notation) and CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation).

You can even download the JS package and run it locally on your browser. 

Concurrent Business Engineering

Some time back, I had blogged about the advantages of having a unified BPM/SOA strategy at the enterprise level.  Ran through a Forrestor report that touch a similar concept and calls it as "Concurrent Business Engineering".

Concurrent Business Engineering entails greater colloboration between Business and IT for jointly working on defining new business processes and also defining the technology platform for supporting the processes.
Business services are best designed with a strong understanding of the business process context, hence a top down BPM process-centric view would help in understanding what services need to be surfaced to provide maximum agility to the business process.

This is similar to the idea of having a unified BPM/SOA strategy and utilizes the best of top-down and bottom-up methods for executing the business strategy - as blogged earlier. 

SOA and BPM

Yesterday, we were having a discussion with one of our customers on the hot topic of SOA and BPM strategy, i.e. can SOA/BPM initiatives be combined?, what are the challenges, pitfalls, best practices, etc. Jotting down some of the key points of the brainstorming session.

• To start with, its important to realize that both BPM/SOA has a common goal - greater business agility and to align IT with business. SOA and BPM complement each other and the potential benefits are compounded when you have a unified enterprise wide strategy for them.
• BPM drives a process-centric thought process - right from design, implementation, monitoring and continuous optimization. BPM forces a paradigm shift from an application centric view to a process centric view. SOA is an architectural style where as BPM is a management discipline.
• A combined BPM/SOA initiative will do the delicate balancing act between incremental and transformational change. Also a combined initiative should enable stakeholders to decide what important processes need that extra agility and prioritize them to be re-engineered as services because funding is always limited.
• Top-down BPM appraoch drives the discovery of services since they provide important insights into understanding what parts of the IT portfolio can be exposed as SOA services. Thus BMP can provide a structured approach for identifying reusable business services.
• SOA services also enable faster integration in BPM as the need for custom integration touch points reduces and this in turn enables faster deployment of BPM. SOA also enables rapid change of business processes which is not possible if the business process in embedded in a lot of traditiona non-SOA applications. For e.g. when a process needs to change to comply with a new regulation or due to a change in business strategy, then a loosely coupled BPM process orchestrated using SOA services is easier to change. New services can be plugged-in or existing services can be rearranged. 

In today's fast changing business dynamics - "as is" and "to be" are simply temporal states of reality. The future state cannot be predicted, we can only stay prepared by keeping our business processes agile.