OMG OCEB BPM Technical Intermediate

OMG Certified Expert in BPM™ (OCEB™): Technical Intermediate[edit]

Official Literature, Coverage Map, ...
Local Folder C:\Uwes\Documents\Beruf\OCEB\OCEB Technical Intermediate

Books[edit]

Ronald G. Ross, Business Rule Concepts[edit]

Basic are:
- Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Business Rules (SBVR), standard released 2008 by the OMG
- RuleSpeak, Business Rule Solutions for expressing business rule notation for expressing business rules in structural natural language, one of three reference notations of SBVR
Fact Model: Structure, the skeleton, is provided by basic noun concepts as represented by terms, and verb-ish connections (ligaments) between those noun concepts as represented by wordings.
- A Fact Model structures basic knowledge about business operations from a business perspective. A Fact Model is a structured business vocabulary. In the Fact Model, concepts are represented by Terms.
- every term needs requires a careful definition. Terms refer to classes rather than to instances.
- Connections between noun concepts are generally expressed using verbs and verb phrases. These noun-and-verb constructions are called wordings. The wordings represent types of connections, called fact types, rather than individual connections, called facts. Fact types are the classes in the area of wordings. For example, for customer places order an actual fact might be Global Supply, Inc. has placed the order A601288. Structured business vocabularies are generally more concerned with identifying fact types rather than actual facts. A fact type is always worded with a verb or verb phrase. Fact type and verb concept are synonyms.
- Basic concepts should not change over time (the essence), subjects of change should be a Business Rule.
- Roles are also part of a Fact Model.
- There are unary, binary or N-ary fact types.
Power, the muscless, is provided by processes, Control and coordination, the nerves, are provided by business rules
- Rule Independence means seperating Business Rules from processes
- Rules are documented in the General Rulebook System (GRBS)
- Rules build directly on Fact Types
- Rules have to be declarative
- A Rule statement is also the guidance message used for business workers
- Business rule enable decision making
there are special purpose elements in fact types:
- Categorization
- Property
- Composition
- Classification
There are two types of Business Rules:
- A Business Rule which can be violated is a behavioral rule. They carry prohibition or obligation. Keywords are must or only.
- Definitional rules carry the sense of neccessity or impossibilities. Keywords are always or never.
Business events should not be part of Business Rules. Consider the rule: A customer must be assigned to an agent if the customer has placed an order. This could be needed to be evaluated by the event Customer places an order or by the event Agent leaves the company.

Smart (enough) systems Google book[edit]

Building the Agile Enterprise with SOA, BPM and MBM (Model Based Management)[edit]

Sarbanes-Oxley internal controls: Effective Auditing with AS5, CobiT and ITIL[edit]

Papers[edit]

OCEB Definition of Business Process[edit]

OCEB_Definition_Of_Business_Process.pdf
5 different Definitions

The Business Rules Manifesto[edit]

Orchestration or Choreography?[edit]

Mike Rosen, BPTrends; 04-08-COL-BPMandSOA-OrchestrationorChoreography- 0804-Rosen v01 _MR_final.doc
difference between Orchestration and Choreography. First:
- Defines a single master controls of all aspects of a process (top-down approach)
- Supports a graphical view of the sequence
- Easily maps to SOA
- Is usually simpler to start with; but often harder to scale to more complex processes
- Is driven by the graphical sequence model, i.e. function follows form
- Represents the state-of-the-practice, and is supported by the majority of tools
There are currently two principle approaches to choreography,and workcomponent-based:
- message-based, define behaviors by exhaustively capturing the message contracts between collaborating parties, supported by the WS-CDL standard (Web Service Choreography Definition Language) and is often used for B2B applications
- The overall process behavior “emerges” from the working of its parts (bottom up). No global perspective is required
- Complex work processes are decomposed into work agendas where each autonomous element controls its own agenda
- Easily maps to event and agent based systems
- Is usually more difficult to start, but often easier to scale to complex processes
- Graphical representations can be derived from the process, i.e. form follows function
- Represents the state-of-the-art, and is gaining support with emerging tools

Starting the BPM Center of Excellence[edit]

Glenn Smith, Starting_the_BPM_COE_(Appian).pdf
Typical activities of a COE include:
- Defining BPM methodologies and best practices
- Providing reusable tools and templates
  - tools for configuration management and version control
- Ensuring consistency of BPM projects with applicable corporate standards
- Providing expertise in the use of the selected tools
  - providing proven approaches
- Providing guidance and performing reviews for all projects
Roles
- BPM executive sponsor
  - not from IT, but from Business
  - controls BPM budget
- Visionary
- Expert in the corperate infrastructure
- BPM tool specialist
- Business Analyst
- Tool developer

Enhancing Business Process Management With Simulation Optimization[edit]

by Jay April et a
01-05 WP Simulation Optimization - April et al.pdf
Simulation is positioned as a means to evaluate the impact of process changes and new processes in a model environment through the creation of what-if scenarios
In 1986, Dr. Fred Glover coined the term metaheuristic to describe a master strategy that guides and modifies other heuristics to produce solutions beyond those that are normally generated in a quest for local optimality.
In the area of design of experiments, the input parameters and structural assumptions associated with a simulation model are called factors. The output performance measures are called responses.
In the world of optimization, the factors become decision variables, and the responses are used to model an objective function and constraints.
Goal are:
- find out which factors have the greatest effect on a response
- combination of factor levels that minimizes or maximizes a response
- subject to constraints imposed on factors and/or responses
Performance objectives in the area of Business processes may include throughput, costs, inventories, cycle times, resource and capital utilization, start-up times, cash flow, and waste.

Modeling and Simulation in Business Process Management[edit]

by M. W. Barnett
11-03 WP Mod Simulation of BPM - Barnett-1.pdf

Workflow Patterns[edit]

BPM-06-22 Workflow Patterns Revised.pdf
- see here

SLAs: A CIO's Guide to Success[edit]

Source
Penalties and rewards
focus on consumables that are consumed
Simple is hard
clear relation between cost and level of support
ask for expectations and set expectations
variable areas with resource pools
ties SLAs to variable component of staff salaries
devide SLA into performance level (e.g. basic, enhanced, premium)
automate SLA performance
99% average availability hide outage of critical application at an important time
more business oriented SLAs:
- measuring what is possible might not be what is needed e.g. for a call-center operations measuring availability of servers, applications, desktops will not measure processes or capacity => research on vital data, select the right layer e.g. application availability is more important than networt or server availability
- definition in business terms, but be careful because what you can't measure you can't manage
- put someone in charge for end-to-end
- revisit SLAs

Establishing Service Level Agreements[edit]

by Naomi Karten

Business Activity Monitoring - Economic Impact on Industry Verticals[edit]

FOUR 07-07-ART-BusActivityMonitoring-Juturu - final.pdf
by Venugopal Jufuru
Gartner defines BAM as a function or application that uses event processing and operational data polling to monitor the status and values of key business indicators in real-time, and issue alerts when indicators are out of normal, or specified conditions are met.
Tibco: Business activity monitoring (BAM) refers to the aggregation, analysis, and presentation of relevant and timely information about business activities inside your organization and involving your customers and partners.
You can't manage what you don't measure
Steps in BAM are:
- Receive Event Data
- Aggregate
- Analyze
- Filter
- Display
- Alert
- Continuous Improvement
Implementation can be performed by:
- Big Bang (if agressive targets)
- Selective Model (small sample with maximum pain areas and quick roll-outs if high pressure)
- Hybrid Model
Implementation is done in phases:
- Plan
  - Identify process owners and business users
  - form a BAM commitee with stakeholders
  - agree on time slot for discovery phase
  - tool evaluation
- Discovery and Analysis
  - prioritize pain areas
  - perform root cause analysis and discover improvement areas
  - agree on KPIs and find time, frequency and location
  - choose solution
- Implement and Continuous Improvement
  - implement BAM
  - educate
  - feed BAM committee
Tool Features are:
- Dashboard
- Correlation of complex events
- predictive analysis
- real-time monitoring
- pattern matching
- messaging, adapters and agents
- rule editor with threshold, sequence and time-based processing
- historical data store
- prediction

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM): The New Face of BPM[edit]

by WebMethods
BAM-The_New_Face_of_BPM_1106.pdf
three new strategic areas:
- Business Assurance and Visibility
  - SLA assurance
  - Defect detection
- Control Services
  - buyer may not be the approver
  - Deadline Management
- Complex Pattern Recognition
BAM concentrates on:
- Volumes like
  - number of transactions
  - number of events
  - number of calls
  - tranaction revenues
  - cost
- Velocities like
  - process cycle time
  - wait-times
  - life-time
- Errors
- Special Conditions

Specifications[edit]

OMG, Business Process Definition Metamodel[edit]

Chapter 1 and 2
dtc-08-05-10 BPDM BusinessProcessDefinitionMetamodel.pdf
Framework for understanding and specifying the processes of an organization or community
BPDM provides the capability to represent and model business processes independent of notation or methodology, thus bringing these different approaches together into a cohesive capability
This is done using a meta model – a model of how to describe business processes
The meta model behind BPDM uses the OMG Meta Object Facility (MOF) to capture business processes in this very general way and to provide an XML syntax for storing and transferring business process models between tools and infrastructures
Reason to resolve diversity in the market because
- Many methodologies (TQM, 6σ, BPR, BPM, etc..)
- No common language between the methodologies
- There are island of technology, methodology or notation
- BPDM allows to represent and model BP independent of notation or methodology
supports two fundamental and complementary views: orchestration and choreography
- orchestration:
  - are represented through sequences of Activities
  - flow chart
  - under the authority of some entity
  - defined order
- Choreography:
  - describes how semi-independent and collaborating entities work together
  - each of entities may have their own internal processes
  - captures the interaction of roles with well defined responsibilies
  - is the basis for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm
Procsess Concepts supported by BPDM
- - All BPMN notation concepts
  - Processes, activities, tasks and sub-processes
  - Workflow
  - Sophisticated control of alternatives and parallel processes
  - Conditional execution paths
  - Signals and events
  - Time-based events and conditions
  - Events based on change in data or external conditions
  - Integration with rules and rules engines through event-based semantics
  - Process groups and swim-lanes
  - Transactions, rollback and compensation
  - Process data and data flow
  - Artifacts and artifact production and dependencies
  - A combination of human and automated process participants
  - Service Oriented Architectures and business services
  - Resource and entity selection
  - Roles, responsibilities & collaborations
  - Bi-directional and composite interactions between entities
  - Automated execution with MDA and process execution engines such as BPEL (See non-normative mapping to BPEL)
  - Interaction protocols, services and design by contract
  - Composite processes
  - UML activity, collaboration and interaction diagram concepts
  - Process specialization, derivation and refinement
Conformance Levels
- BPDM Full Compliance
- BPDM Collaboration Protocol Compliance
- BPDM Orchestration Process Compliance
- BPDM - BPMN Compliance

Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules specification (SBVR), V1.0[edit]

formal-08-01-02.pdf
Wikipedia
The SBVR defines:
- a vocabulary and rules for documenting the semantics of business vocabularies, business facts, and business rules
- an XMI schema for the interchange of business vocabularies and business rules among organizations and between software tools.
incorporates the formal use of natural language in modeling
part of MDA
integrate with other standards (notably BMM and BPMN)
MOF compliant

OASIS; ebXML Business Process Specification[edit]

ebxmlbp-v2.0.4-Spec-os-en.pdf
eBusiness eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) defines a standard language by which business systems may be configured to support execution of Business Collaborations consisting of Business Transactions
The ebBP technical specification supports the specification of Business Transactions and the choreography of Business Transactions into Business Collaborations
A Choreography is an ordering of Business Activities within a Business Collaboration
The choreography is specified in terms of Business States, and transitions between those Business States.
When a transition is validated: it does not mean that the target Business Activity would start immediately, it means that the Business Activity is “enabled” and the initiating party may now send the request whenever appropriate, provided that it remains within the TimeToPerform of the Binary (Business) Collaboration
It is merely the execution of the backend systems, which instruct the BSI (Business Service Interface) to send or receive messages that advance the state of a collaboration
There is no execution engine associated to the collaboration itself.
The Business Collaboration is either in the state of performing a given Business Activity (or multiple concurrent Business Activities) or waiting to start a Business Activity, unless it has reached a completion state
Once a Business Activity completes a transition from this Business Activity, it navigates to another Business Activity
A business message initiates a Business Collaboration or advances its state

Web Services Choreography Description Language Version 1.0[edit]

Web Services Choreography Description Language Version 1.pdf
chapter 1.2 and 2
The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is an XML-based language that describes peer-to-peer collaborations of participants by defining, from a global viewpoint, their common and complementary observable behavior; where ordered message exchanges result in accomplishing a common business goal.
The WS-CDL specification is aimed at being able to precisely describe collaborations between any type of participant regardless of the supporting platform or programming model used by the implementation of the hosting environment. One participant might use BPEL, the other one might use Java legacy applications.
Their collaboration takes place in a jointly agreed set of ordering and constraint rules, whereby information is exchanged between the participants.
WS-CDL model entities are:
- roleType, relationshipType and participantType
- informationType
- choreography
- channelType
- workunit
- activities and ordering structures
- interaction activity
- semantics