Product Description

Ten years ago, groupware bundled with email and calendar applications helped track the flow of work from person to person within an organization. Workflow in today's enterprise means more monitoring and orchestrating massive systems. A new technology called Business Process Management, or BPM, helps software architects and developers design, code, run, administer, and monitor complex network-based business processes

BPM replaces those sketchy flowchart diagrams that business analysts draw on whiteboards with a precise model that uses standard graphical and XML representations, and an architecture that allows it converse with other services, systems, and users.

Sound complicated? It is. But it's downright frustrating when you have to search the Web for every little piece of information vital to the process. Essential Business Process Modeling gathers all the concepts, design, architecture, and standard specifications of BPM into one concise book, and offers hands-on examples that illustrate BPM's approach to process notation, execution, administration and monitoring.

Author Mike Havey demonstrates standard ways to code rigorous processes that are centerpieces of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which defines how networks interact so that one can perform a service for the other. His book also shows how BPM complements enterprise application integration (EAI), a method for moving from older applications to new ones, and Enterprise Service BUS for integrating different web services, messaging, and XML technologies into a single network. BPM, he says, is to this collection of services what a conductor is to musicians in an orchestra: it coordinates their actions in the performance of a larger composition.

Essential Business Process Modeling teaches you how to develop examples of process-oriented applications using free tools that can be run on an average PC or laptop. You'll also learn about BPM design patterns and best practices, as well as some underlying theory. The best way to monitor processes within an enterprise is with BPM, and the best way to navigate BPM is with this valuable book.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #433516 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

About the Author
Michael Harvey is an architect of several major BPM applications and author of magazine articles on BPM and process-oriented applications. In addition to being interested in the foundational concepts of BPM, Michael has spent much of his career working for companies that sell BPM product solutions (BEA with Weblogic Integration and IBM with Websphere Business Integration).

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Customer Reviews

what he says doesn't work does, what he says does doesn't
Gregor Hohpe should have read past the first 100 pages. This book is good on theory, poor on practice (does that remind you of any other SOA book?).
The examples Havey provides of "non-trivial" systems in the back are, in fact, quite trivial. What's worse is that when he ventures into the territory of "advanced" features, he gets lost. For example, on p.270, he provides an eventHandlers section, but comments it out saying that it doesn't work. I was able to get it to work as written with just a minor tweak, but he slags off the vendor instead (p.284) and proposes an awkward hack for a workaround (p.277). Then, on p.308, he presents us with a piece of parallelism that depends for its success on the use of a correlationSet. This is supposed to be clever, but is, in fact, just poor programming practice. Not only that, but it doesn't work! It can't possibly, not the way it's written. He just sent it off to the publisher without testing. We're not talking about simple syntax errors here... this is a fundamental conceptual flaw in what he's proposing. Pretty basic stuff for him to be stubbing his toe on.

Ephemera, not essentials
If you go by this book, the essentials of Business Process Modeling consist of knowing a bewildering multitude of languages and (industry) standards. Process theory is covered on the surface. There's a chapter on patterns whose presentation has very little in common with the established patterns form and where it is at least questionable if they really live up to pattern status beyond simply being modeling idioms. The biggest drawback, however, is that this book hardly teaches anything about actually modeling business processes. By comparison, imagine a book on software design that introduces the various UML diagrams and the tools of the day -- but stops short of saying a thing about actually doing software design. No doubt, there's a place for books on notations, standards, and tools. But don't confuse those with the essentials of a field. When modeling business processes, analyzing and understanding them comes first, expressing them in some notation comes much latter. Unfortunately, Havey doesn't touch the first part at all.

Nice Read, Accurate, Relevant
First off, let me say that I just got this and I have read only about 100 pages. But from what I read so far, this book deserves to have a review, and a good one at that! I knew I was up to something when I saw that Wil van der Aalst was a technical reviewer. Writing a book on process management with him as a reviewer might be a scary endeavour for the author but it guarantees the reader a book with no handwaving and accurate content.

If you are tired of BPM name-droppers who use words like pi-calculus, process patterns etc. to intimidate and confuse others but you have no time to go back to grad school or read 1000 pages, you have found the ultimate weapon. This book is accurate in detail but easy to read and understand. We get a quick overview of BPM, the theoretical underpinnings (yeah, the calculus), common flavors of execution and modeling languages (BPMN, BPEL, YAWL etc). This is where most books will slowly peter out. Not here -- on top of that we get a nice collection of process patterns, based on the excellent work of Wil v.d.Aalst and his colleagues. We also learn about WS-CDL (Choreography Description) and the relationship between choreography and orchestration.

Of course, the book is not perfect as it takes on a tough task. Could there be more detail on some of the languages? Yeah, but through how many pages of XML listings do you really want to read? The book could be 1000 pages long but I think that would have made it worse. I feel that the author found a good compromise by focusing on architectural trade-offs instead of belaboring tools and syntax. Some of the artwork (e.g. screenshots) is a bit blurry, but the good content makes that an easy detail to ignore.

I want to point out that the book focuses more on the technical aspects of the languages and execution engines than the pure modeling side of BPM. This makes it ideally suited for people with a technical background who work in the Web Services/SOA/BPM/BPEL arena but it might not be as enjoyable for a business analyst trying to develop large process models.