Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I am attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

This was a session focused on BPM 11g. It’s a bit of a whirlwind overview, but so far they have emphasized the use of BPMN 2.0, Business Rules integration, SCA, and the new rich form designer.

Next up is the BPA suite based on their OEM relationship with IDS Scheer ARIS. 11g introduces round trip integration with BPM Studio and a unified repository with IDS products, etc. I haven’t heard anything about Oracle ER becoming a centralized metadata repository for all Oracle products, which a find a bit surprising. It could just be that I’m in the wrong sessions, but more and more, I believe a common repository is going to be a critical component.

The presenters went on to talk about process portals, including a collaborative modeling portal, a work space model (a context specific portal for one or more related processes) and an instance-specific view (for tracking events, dealines, etc. about a specific instance of a process).

The next topic discussed was dynamic BPM. This included rule driven processes, rule driven data validation, dynamic service binding, and rule driven task management. Clearly, the theme here is integration with a rules engine and having the ability to modify the rules which will change how the process gets executes, while not requiring a redeployment of the process itself.

They have also made changes to the human workflow component to better support for unstructured processes. The technique described makes sense, but this feels like a “show me” category. Getting users to use the tooling to dynamically add new process participants and steps sounds great, but there may be some big cultural hurdles to overcome to make this useful.

They then went over enhancement to process instrumentation and business activity monitoring, including real time publishing of process metrics to BAM. They also can feed Oracle’s CEP engine for dynamic processing based on incoming metrics and events.

Overall, the message is that Oracle has a comprehensive and unified BPM platform. From the slides, it certainly appears comprehensive. The 11g release is all about unification onto a common platform, and as long as what’s been on the slides accurately reflects this new platform, 11g should be a good step forward for Oracle BPM.

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