panama canal authority technology division software … · 2010. 9. 3. · orchestration engines...

PANAMA CANAL AUTHORITY

Technology Division Software Engineering Section

RFI for Business Process Management Suites


Rev. September 1, 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction and Context for Vendors ................................................................................... 3 A. Company Description .............................................................................................. 3 B. Purpose of the Request for Information .................................................................. 3 C. Process Requirements ............................................................................................ 3 D. Definition of a BPMS ............................................................................................... 3 E. BPMS Usage Scenarios .......................................................................................... 6 F. Instructions for Respondents ................................................................................... 7

II. Vendor Background .............................................................................................................. 8 A. Corporate Background ............................................................................................ 8 B. BPM Software Experience ....................................................................................... 8 C. Partnerships and Standards Bodies ........................................................................ 9 D. BPMS Software Versions ........................................................................................ 9 E. Customer Service and Support ............................................................................... 9 F. Research and Development .................................................................................... 9 G. Customer References .............................................................................................. 9

III. Technical Requirements ..................................................................................................... 10

IV. Functionality Requirements ................................................................................................ 11 A. Process Execution and State Management Engine .............................................. 11 B. Model-Driven Composition Environment ............................................................... 15 C. Document and Content Interaction ........................................................................ 19 D. User and Group Interaction ................................................................................... 21 E. Basic Connectivity ................................................................................................. 24 F. BAM and Business Event Support ........................................................................ 26 G. Simulation and Optimization .................................................................................. 30 H. Business Rule Management ................................................................................. 31 I. Management and Administration ........................................................................... 34 J. Process Component Registry/Repository ............................................................. 36 K. Architecture ........................................................................................................... 39

V. Additional Information ......................................................................................................... 40

VI. Next Steps/Partnership ....................................................................................................... 40

VII. Annex “Solution Implementation Costs” ............................................................................. 41

VIII. Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 48



I. Introduction and Context for Vendors

A. Company Description

The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) is the entity of the Government of Panama established under Title XIV of the National Constitution with exclusive charge of the operation, administration, management, preservation, maintenance, and modernization of the Canal, as well as its activities and related services, pursuant to legal and constitutional regulations in force, so that the Canal may operate in a safe, continuous, efficient, and profitable manner.

B. Purpose of the Request for Information The ACP plans to acquire a business process management suite (BPMS) and implement with this, the company’s processes. The objective of this request is to obtain information from prospective BPMS vendors based on ACP requirements.

C. Process Requirements The ACP is seeking for method to provide real-time visibility into business functions and business processes. In addition, the ACP is required to reduce the time needed to complete a business process, the number of steps required to perform tasks or the number of errors made in implementing an activity. Thereafter, the ACP shall have enough information to optimize the business processes or to have data for decision making, i.e. to analyze the number of employees needed to complete a job, thereby allowing the organization to utilize those employees for additional growth in other areas. Currently, all business processes are analyzed manually, case by case, and by different areas within the organization.

D. Definition of a BPMS A BPMS is an integrated suite of software infrastructure technologies that addresses business users' desire to see and manage work as it progresses across organizational boundaries. Successful completion of work requires the tight coordination of people, systems and information. A BPMS supports this full view of work by coordinating the interactions among people, systems and information, which are all equally important aspects of work. A BPMS supports



process modeling, design, development and execution via the runtime environment in one package. To support the process life cycle from modeling through execution to monitoring, the process model must become the business process that is executed. Making the model fully executable and enabling business people to interact with business transactions running in the environment require a suite of BPM-enabling software technologies. The BPMS combines several BPM-enabling technologies, such as business process modeling, business activity monitoring (BAM), business rule engines, portals, Web services-based integration and information management. A suite increases the effectiveness of these tools through interoperability and an explicit approach to coordinating workflow, including human tasks, "systematized" tasks, policies and information flows. The typical core BPM-enabling technologies that are architecturally integrated into a BPMS include the following:

1. Orchestration engines coordinate the sequencing of activities and steps (systematized and manual, human workflow steps) according to the flows and rules in the process model.

2. Human workflow management put controls around human activities to make them visible and more manageable.

3. Business intelligence and analysis tools support the analysis of

data produced during process execution. Capabilities range from reporting to online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis to graphical user dashboards. BAM systems do this in real time with proactive alerting.

4. Complex-event processing helps discover activities and events of

significance in the context that a process participates in to keep the process in synch with the changing conditions.

5. Automated business process discovery provides the ability to

discover current and best practices for existing processes.

6. Rule engines execute rules that abstract business policies and decision tables from the underlying applications and make more-flexible process changes possible.

7. Business rule management aggregates collections of logically

related rules and associates them to business policies and anticipated



business scenarios to coordinate changes for quick process adaptation.

8. Process metadata repository/registry contains process definitions,

process components, process models, business rules and other process data that can be browsed by business and IT professionals to foster greater understanding and to enable reuse across multiple domains. The orchestration engine uses this information at runtime to dynamically find and then bind to these process components.

9. Simulation and optimization tools enable business managers to

compare new process designs with operational performance. Scenarios are executed, altering resource constraints and business goals, to assess risk and display the financial and operational (that is, timeliness and quality) impact on the organization.

10. Integration tools link the model to other system assets (data and

logic) that support work steps.

11. Portal/other user interface technology manages the interactions with users through user interfaces.

12. Enterprise content management technology manages structured

and unstructured information created and used in a process.

13. Collaboration technologies, such as e-mail, instant messaging, virtual team rooms, whiteboards and social networks, support human collaboration within a process.

14. Case management is a representation of a business activity and

outcomes that becomes the current state of said activity. This is essential for tracing the completion of collaborative and unstructured knowledge-based processes.

The best BPMSs are not just a bundling of previously stand-alone products. They provide a set of architecturally integrated, service-oriented components. The technologies in a BPMS are pre-integrated into a single, unified architecture to deliver a single product experience. This architecture enables users to work quickly and fluidly throughout the process life cycle — from analysis to design to execution to monitoring to revision — with greater collaboration between business users and IT professionals. In this way, a BPMS acts like a single product, despite its modularity, and delivers a consistent process management experience for users in the design and execution phases. With help from the IT



organization, application logic and data can be made accessible to the BPMS, enabling business managers to monitor, analyze and iteratively refine the execution path for work, including the manual efforts of people and system-automated steps.

E. BPMS Usage Scenarios A BPMS is most appropriate for processes that have balanced requirements for the coordination of people, systems and information, and in cases where management of the interactions and interdependencies among all three aspects of work is critical to work outcomes. The explicit process management approach of a BPMS (the best-fit usage scenario) is most valuable for processes that need to change frequently, extend over hours and days, cross multiple physical boundaries (such as organizational boundaries, boundaries among facilities, system boundaries and information boundaries), and require a high degree of coordination of human activities, information, business transactions and business rules. Also, the process often depends on human collaboration for a successful outcome (such as new product designs, problem diagnosis and case-management-style problem domains). Processes with these characteristics are typically externally facing. This makes them highly susceptible to disruption from external forces, such as weather patterns, currency fluctuations, consumer preferences, commoditization pressures, trading-partner actions, competitive pricing, regulatory changes, geopolitical events and skill availability. At a macro-level, the ACP wants a technology to support its BPM project or program. The intention is to create a business process abstraction layer for established applications and services (hosted on application infrastructure). Based on Gartner´s analysis, there are four main reasons used to adopt a BPMS (these are not mutually exclusive):

1. Specific process-based applications: The business (supported by the IT organization) tends to buy BPMSs to improve business performance through broader and better coordination of a mission-critical process. The business seeks a rapid implementation for a new application or an extension and unification of existing applications.

2. Continuous process improvement: The business and the IT

organization collaborate on technology decisions to deliver management visibility and agility for key processes. This program should be led by a process improvement manager and a governance council or equivalent. A business process competency center should offer the methodologies and services to support the execution of the program. A BPMS is selected to



provide a stable platform, with integrated services to use to deliver continuous process improvements.

3. Redesign for a process-based SOA: The IT organization drives

business enthusiasm for BPM to help prioritize its efforts to rationalize and modernize the application portfolio for SOA. The IT organization buys a BPMS as a model-driven environment that uses explicit process models to prioritize its implementation of an SOA, while also enabling process transparency and agility for business.

In Service-Oriented Architecture autonomous has a loosely-coupled and coarse-grained services with well-defined interfaces provide business functionality and can be discovered and accessed through a supportive infrastructure. This shall allow internal and external system integration as well as the flexible reuse of application logic through the composition of services. (Ref. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/heres-an-soa-definition-we-can-live-with/490)

4. Business transformation: Senior business executives drive buying

decisions in this usage scenario. They want to make a "game changing" play by rethinking an entire business process. The ability to create shared process understanding across stakeholders (through modeling, analysis and simulation), synchronize execution with the model and support rapid innovation makes the BPMS approach highly attractive. These buyers highly value the enhanced collaboration between business and IT.

The ACP is analyzing the adoption of BPMS mainly on: (1) redesign for a process-based SOA and, (2) continuous process improvement.

F. Instructions for Respondents

This section describes the general procedures with which respondents must comply. Respondents must follow the guidelines given below, as these will ease the comparison of offerings and should eliminate any confusion on how responses are organized.

1. Timetable. Respondents will have 15 days from the date of publication of this document to provide information requested. We estimate the publication of an RFP within 30 days after evaluating all responses.

2. Pricing. The proposal must include an estimate of all costs, in U.S.

dollars, related to the solution implementation (software licenses,



maintenance costs, professional services for implementation, knowledge transfer to ACP, customizations, travel, etc.).

3. Use table provided in Annex “Solution Implementation Costs”.

4. Confidentiality. This document contains confidential information that

is shared for informational purposes only. The information is not to be used other than in connection with the response.

5. Compliance. Respondents' information must be in a format consistent

with the specified sections, subsections, and numbered paragraphs and must correspond to each one individually. Failure to address any item shall be interpreted as a noncompliant response.

6. Contacts. All questions or requests for clarifications should be directed

in writing to:

Name: Enrique Duarte, Project Manager, Software Engineering Section

e-Mail: [email protected] Telephone: Country code 507, then 272-1868

II. Vendor Background

A. Corporate Background

Summarize your [vendor's] corporate background and financial statements, as well as any information relevant to ACP.

Contractors must have a positive net worth of at least 50% of the financial grade, which they are applying for (Net Worth is defined as paid-up capital, reserve, preference/premium shares and accumulated profit/losses for Limited Private Companies). For other firms and businesses, Net Worth shall be taken to mean the sum of cash/deposit, balance in current account, profit/losses and withdrawal.

B. BPM Software Experience

Provide a general description of your [vendor's] background and experience with regard to BPM software.



The Contractor shall have extensive experience in implementing 24x7 applications and must have an ISO 9001 certification or equivalent. Contractor shall also have to assure that problem reporting and resolution complies with international standards. The Contractor shall list, identify, and describe in as much detail and specificity as possible the list of former and ongoing clients for which it performed, during the previous (5) years, equivalent services, projects, and works related and relevant to the subject matter and bearing of this Contract. Letters from these clients shall be submitted with the proposal, including point of contact with telephone numbers and e-mail.

C. Partnerships and Standards Bodies

Highlight any relevant relationships with other vendors for technology included in your product or recommended solution. Specify the nature of the relationship, such as OEM, co-marketed or co-selling. Highlight relevant participation in industry and technology standards bodies. State which standards are supported in the version/release described herein.

D. BPMS Software Versions Describe the current versions of your [vendor's] BPMS software, including the next planned releases, major upgrades and sunset considerations.

E. Customer Service and Support Describe your [vendor's] support for enterprises that use BPMS as a mission-critical platform, including upgrades and conversions, acceptance testing, professional services, training and issue resolution.

F. Research and Development Describe your [vendor's] general R&D approach, current areas and levels of investment. Outline the capabilities planned for your next release or version and the timetable for those capabilities.

G. Customer References The proposal must include letters of reference from customers, including Latin America, for whom the vendor has implemented a BPMS solution. These must provide client information, such as point of contact, email, telephone numbers, etc. The customers referenced must be similar to ACP’s project scope and size.



References which do not comply with these conditions will not be taken into consideration. III. Technical Requirements ACP is characterized for developing and implementing solutions with the highest and most solid available technology, reason why the proposals must present products or solutions in line with this foundation. ACP is committed to open standards due to the fact that these minimize risks involving investment losses, when migrating technological platforms. Therefore, only products or solutions falling within the following specifications will be accepted:

High level of connectivity, compatibility and interoperability between multiple platforms.

Contemplate computer industry standards. Ease the transition to new technologies.

Due to the existing ACP technological environment, proposals must consider the following preferences. Table – ACP Technological Environment

Component ACP Preferences 1. Servers Intel-based (HP)

Unix-based (Sun) 2. Server operating systems Windows Server 2003 and above

Sun Solaris 10 and above 3. Work stations Intel-based (example, HP, Dell) 4. Workstation operating

systems Windows XP SP3 and above

5. Database MS SQL Server 2005 and above Oracle 10g RDBMS and above

6. Web Server Microsoft IIS Oracle iAS10g on Unix

7. Browsers Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and above 8. Corporate email system Microsoft Exchange 2007 9. Imaging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and

above 10. Office productivity tool Microsoft Office 2003 and above



Provide the infrastructure requirements for your solution, based on ACP preferences listed above, as well as the costs involved. IV. Functionality Requirements

The following tables describe 11 categories of BPMS functionality which ACP considers important. Each table provides a list of detailed features within the broad 11 areas, along with space to indicate if the functionality is supported, partially supported or not supported. Please provide an explanation for your responses.

A. Process Execution and State Management Engine This includes the ability to orchestrate dynamic and static interaction patterns between and across human, system and information resources based on modeled metadata, process flow and/or the state of a case. This includes deterministic and nondeterministic patterns, such as dynamic collaboration. The engine maintains the state of process instances, activities and interactions. Also, it records all state changes for managed process aspects, such as activities, flows, events, data, rules and roles. The underlying process execution and state management engine orchestrates the sequence of activities and information flows in the managed process, regardless of the resources performing the work. It maintains the state of all the executing process instances, their activities, and the steps between the human resources, the system resources and the information content, based on modeled metadata, process flow and the state of a case. Because many enterprises around the world have already applied a lot of software technology to their business processes, it is easy to forget the importance of the human contribution to the successful outcome of a business process. Furthermore, people often provide the most significant opportunities for unique approaches to exception handling, error reduction, customer responsiveness, cost savings and work quality. Using software to coordinate people-based process steps, in conjunction with system-automated steps and information flows, is especially important for broad, cross-functional, end-to-end processes with a high concentration of knowledge workers. All BPMS products can support the business process from end to end, including human-focused tasks combined with system-focused tasks and information flows, but the level of sophistication varies significantly, especially in the area of human workflow automation. Human workflow automation refers to the



management of work items as they move from one person to another or among a group or team over a period of time. Minimum functionality includes managing roles and tasks for routing, review, escalation and approval. More-sophisticated capabilities include: dynamic work queues for individuals and groups; supporting multilevel work escalation and approvals; setting priorities for categories of work items; support for voting; and providing controls for measuring the timeliness of work. Table 1 - Process Execution Engine Features

Requested Feature Required

or Optional

Yes/Partial/No with Explanation

1. Escalation capabilities to address late work or important events and activities.

Required

2. The ability to dynamically include process participants outside the enterprise's boundaries, for value and supply chains (a leading-edge feature).

Required

3. The ability to modify — terminate, update and suspend — in-flight processes.

Required

4. The ability to have multiple versions of the same processes running at once — version control.

Required

5. Orchestrating services, composites and sub-flows in execution mode.

Required




or Optional


6. During process execution, the engine can locate and manage Web services and interact with service-oriented business applications.

Optional

7. Multi-device channel support (for example, basic phones, extended phones, smartphones, wireless notebooks and wireless game controllers).

Optional

8. An integrated log that records any changes to the state of the resources being coordinated, including people, structured data and unstructured/semi-structured information content, rules, goals, etc.

Required

9. Support for Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) as a standard for interoperability across execution engines.

Required

10. Support for long-running business events, cases and distributed process management.

Required




or Optional


11. Interaction with design and runtime registries/repositories and event state engines

Required

12. Support for a continuum of timers (including sub-seconds, seconds, minutes, hours and days) to wait for state updates from resources.

Required

13. The ability to schedule future events, steps, sub-processes and process executions.

Required

14. Schema for prioritizing user cases.

Optional

15. Graphical view cases showing status in real-time

Required

16. Printing capability of the process activities without additional coding

Required

17. Organization of user cases using smart folders through the portal.

Optional

18. Customization of user case identification using prefixes, suffixes or other.

Optional

19. Multiple calendars Required 20. Digital signatures Required



B. Model-Driven Composition Environment This is a modeling environment to support the roles of the business analyst, process architect, solution architect and the developer that enables modeling and architecting all process artifacts, including process design, human interaction, rule interaction, user interface, system interaction and electronic forms with verification. It may provide process wizards, templates and support "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) design. It typically supports drag-and-drop modeling as well as flow modeling (based on swim lanes). Other modeling methods may also be supported. This also supports process analysis and simulation. The ability to give business professionals a means to visualize their processes and accompanying decision points is the foundation of true process management. A strong BPMS provides a semantically rich, multilevel modeling environment supporting business and IT collaboration for process designs and policy management (that is, business rules). Modeling the process flows will incorporate visualization techniques to identify bottlenecks, disconnects and inefficiencies. Process owners and stakeholders can quickly see where further value can be added, administrative or repetitive tasks need automation, human tasks can be streamlined, and opportunities for error and cycle time reductions exist. The process models are also used as a universal communication tool for the business to document and describe the work for system integrators, developers, trading partners, regulators and business process outsourcers. The ability to depict activities from the highest level of abstraction down to detailed technological implementation views makes a multilevel modeling environment an important ingredient in any BPM effort. The composition environment is targeted at business process analysts who support business leaders to identify process improvements and begin to author and prototype new designs. This environment supports graphical modeling, analysis, simulation and prototyping of alternatives, enabling the analyst to work side-by-side with business professionals as stakeholders in the process. The modeling environment enables the analyst to gather input for process improvements (including participant suggestions, management goals and objectives, and quantified performance outcomes desired) and analyze weaknesses in the current approach. Models are shared with IT professionals for incremental technical design. Increasingly, BPMS vendors are supporting Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as the default notation at the conceptual level. An Achilles' heel of business process flow improvement can be the tendency to move directly to the delivery stage without sufficient business design or the proper level of detail. Determining why an organization performs certain activities is a neglected step, and this can be helped by having a



reference model for a starting point. Even if deep analysis is not applied to a business process, there's a lot to be said for the ability to create a graphical representation to "eyeball" the process and find business flow issues at the business level. Although visual analysis brings a certain level of benefit, more-sophisticated analytical functionality can help identify subtle opportunities on small models and help digest models that are beyond one person's ability to comprehend. Table 2 - Model-Driven Composition Environment

Requested Feature Required or

Optional Yes/Partial/No

with Explanation 1. Organizational model support,

including reporting and functional unit relationships. "Swim lanes" are a popular representational approach.

Required

2. The ability to define human process steps, with visual drill-downs and sublevels supported.

Required

3. Diagram validation — for example, domain checks, completion checks and warnings on inconsistent patterns.

Required

4. Customizable representations of processes and inclusion of graphical formats, such as icons, stencils and shape libraries.

Required

5. Support for roles, resource and organization mapping/modeling through multiple views of the same model.

Required

6. Assembling and creating business services, composites and sub-flows.

Required





with Explanation 7. Support for design patterns,

code and data definition generation.

Required

8. Links to modeling, design and project management technologies (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

9. A user interface composition environment for building portlets and portal pages, rich client forms, and other styles of rich user experiences.

Required

10. Easy-to-understand flow and rule-modeling support, including standards such as BPMN.

Required

11. The ability to support multiple graphical representations, including overview and drilldown maps and exposing various degrees of technical abstraction to support business as well as IT roles.

Required

12. Providing easy-to-use exits to include other design time environments (rule engines, for instance).

Required

13. Model and metadata import/export capabilities — for example, BPMN or Unified Modeling Language (UML) with automated mapping and transformation as needed. This should include Visio and other popular modeling tools.

Optional

14. Rich graphical process designer with flow animation and auto line drawing with smoothing.

Required





with Explanation 15. Production promotion and

change management support.Required

16. Tailorable and extensible icons and stencils.

Required

17. Easy navigation, including zoom in/out, to make large, complex models more understandable, plus printing options.

Required

18. Visibility for users to external dependencies of shared processes

Required

19. Modeling tool included Required 20. Component reutilization

between different processes Required

21. Automatic generation of forms based on data model which allows users to determine the form structure without coding.

Optional

22. Business rule engine included Required 23. Work assignments based on

different criteria. Required

24. Load balancing of work assignments

Required

25. Initiated processes can finish regardless of database modifications

Required

26. Multiple environment deployment (development, testing, pre-production, production)

Required

27. Automated deployment to other environments

Required

28. Selection of generated code (ex. .NET, Java, etc.); specify which.

Optional

29. Capability to modify business rules for a specific timeframe

Optional





with Explanation 30. Attachment of files to different

stages of a process Required

31. Attachment of notes in different steps of a process

Required

32. Online instructions for documents, such as global instructions, tool tips, by context)

Required

C. Document and Content Interaction

The BPM engine can interact with document and content management repositories for incorporating all forms of content into the process and tracking content use inside the context of a process flow. The BPMS must be able to access, update and track how content is created and used in the process and send the results back to the repository of record. In all business processes, information is either created or consumed as work progresses. Therefore, participants in a process need the ability to create new content as well as the ability to access and leverage existing content. Having the right information at one's fingertips at the right time is key to process success. BPMS vendors will increasingly include capabilities to interact and manipulate business content (including images, documents, voice, e-mail, blueprints and physical evidence) as a first-class object to be manipulated as required in the process, not simply as an external reference "attachment." Documents using XML are increasingly common and will be assembled dynamically at time of demand. Table 3 - Document and Content Interaction


or Optional


1. The ability to interface with leading ECM/EDM repositories to access/read, route and update content managed by third-party repository providers.

Required




or Optional


2. Support of the case management style of work with the ability to create, populate, index and route folders in the context of the process.

Optional

3. The ability to create documents and correspondence as part of the process and to store this content in leading repositories.

Required

4. Support for foldering, creation of compound documents, text indexing of content created and document linking.

Optional

5. Support for imaging capabilities, including capture, image indexing, recognition engines, annotation and repair capabilities

Optional

6. Support for Web content management and publishing capabilities, including authoring, template staging, viewable Web formats, syndication capabilities and archiving.

Optional

7. Sophisticated search capabilities that can support structured and unstructured text, indexes, image and content internally or on the Web (a leading-edge feature).

Required




or Optional


8. Links to knowledge management taxonomies that profile knowledge to internal and external resources (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

9. Support for micro-content — using words and paragraphs with rules to create patterned letters for generating custom contracts or customer correspondence (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

D. User and Group Interaction

This supports individual and group teamwork at both design time and runtime. The design-time collaboration tools help close the communication gap between business and IT users regarding the process design. The runtime tools provide work collaboration facilities, so that business work teams can drive work to completion faster, as well as detect and change system behavior for more-optimal system performance, leveraging advanced visualization metaphors and virtual communities. During runtime, process participants require a workbench that delivers broad visibility to process tasks, work content and resources. Participants must be able to perform their assigned tasks, but must also be empowered to seek new ways to increase their own as well as group productivity. A personalized workbench provides an entry point by role or task into predefined and goal-directed processes while considering the role context and specific work habits. This user interface should support participant activities with resources available to them at any step of the process on any specific business case, event or transaction. This would include knowledge, skills, and various forms of content inside or outside the organization. Managers should also have visibility into peaks and valleys of specific process activities and should also have an access point (that is, a workbench) to access available skills and knowledge resources that can be dynamically assigned by business events, cases and transactions. A good BPMS will support multiple



styles of user access and user interfaces, including JSR168, Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), mashups, forms, multichannel support and rich Internet application (RIA) user interfaces. Collaboration across business and IT roles throughout the process improvement cycle is equally important. Sharing the responsibility for improving business operations and evolving processes to compete more effectively anywhere at any time is a strong and unstoppable trend. Facilitating teamwork, throughput and team creativity for changing processes and rules — no matter what the geographic location of the participants — requires collaboration features combined with ubiquitous access. Integrating group collaborative interactions within a broader business process can deliver significant productivity gains. The ability to seamlessly assemble new ways of processing work and catering to customer needs is an advantage in today's competitive marketplace. This is an area of emerging use and need, and the inclusion of these collaboration features shows real vision for BPMS players. Table 4 - User and Group Interaction


or Optional


1. A personalization engine that uses at least static attributes to drive behaviors leveraging role/skill profiles.

Optional

2. A portal page mechanism that links portlets to pages, based on personalization.

Optional

3. Separation of "power user" and professional developer features and wizard-like assists for power users.

Required

4. Customizable shared and work list support for human task access.

Required

5. Thin- and thick-client access to work queues, depending on user needs.

Required




or Optional


6. Saved preferences by modeler/viewer and multiple-language support.

Required

7. A portlet model subscribing to JSR168 and/or WSRP, which provides access to external content and applications.

Required

8. Links to skill inventories, accomplishments and training profiles for internal resources (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

9. The ability to support and capture discussions around goals, targets, policies, rules and deadlines. Discussion threads should be logged as part of the audit trail (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

10. Access to shared work lists, calendars and case information (including unstructured and semi-structured information and various forms of content) to facilitate collaboration (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

11. Setting up collaborative workspaces, such as community suites/chats and virtual team rooms (a leading-edge feature).

Optional




or Optional


12. Inclusion of various collaborative technologies, such as e-mail, instant messaging, Web conferencing, wikis, blogs, bulletin boards and social networks (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

13. Advanced visualization and 3-D dynamic interfaces, including touch interactive, gaming metaphors and visual support for ad hoc process interactions (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

E. Basic Connectivity

Because a BPMS is an assembly and composition environment, it includes tools that enable process designers/developers to publish and subscribe to system services, choreograph service interaction, and set up bidirectional connections to various back-end business applications, using Web-service-style protocols and connectors. Because so many process steps are already automated in application code, a BPMS must be able to leverage existing assets and support their reuse in new, composite process flows. The ability for IT organizations to create services, wrap services around legacy applications and build composite flows will enhance the overall performance of a BPMS. However, these are not requirements for a successful BPMS implementation. Because of the diverse integration patterns for software assets and the diversity of technologies needed to support these assets, this is a deep and complex area. Increasingly, existing business and technology building blocks are typically represented as Web services and pseudo-services (wrapped legacy, subflows and composite applications). The state management engine (orchestration engine) should be able to invoke these external assets for easy incorporation into process flows. In addition to basic Web service-style connectivity options, a BPMS should allow for the integration and coordination required via leveraging existing integration technologies, such as enterprise service buses (ESBs), integration brokers, message-oriented



middleware, integration platform suites, business-to-business platforms and application programming interfaces. These technologies allow for the inclusion of packaged application functionality (exposed as business services), newly created services, data access, available Web services, and legacy system support. Table 5 - Basic Connectivity


or Optional


1. The ability to send and receive messages using the most popular message transports (for example, MSMQ, MQ Series, JMS and SOAP).

Required

2. The ability to produce and consume Web services using leading WS* protocols at a minimum.

Required

3. Basic interfacing protocol support, such as ODBC, JDBC, SQL and HTTP.

Required

4. Support for or access to system message routing, an ESB, transformation and data access.

Required

5. Enabling links to heterogeneous platforms, data sources and application functions (a nice-to-have feature).

Required

6. Fabrication of business services represented as Web services in and across standard or common technology stacks.

Required

7. Creation of composite applications and micro-flows.

Required




or Optional


8. Access to complex event streams (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

9. Support for delivering information to external systems via string or XML formats, APIs, etc.

Required

10. Error and incident management

Required

11. Exposure of web services for remote activation

Required

12. Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint 2010

Required

F. BAM and Business Event Support

This includes business monitoring dashboards and reporting tools used for monitoring and alerting business managers and process participants on near-real-time current and changing business operation behaviors; key performance indicators (KPIs); and OLAP leveraging complex events and data. This would also include process mining and automated process discovery capabilities. BAM and event processing represent rapidly growing features of the BPMS. The ability to monitor business events, and to associate and correlate them to business scenarios for both desirable and undesirable performance outcomes, is a key ingredient for gaining control over business processes. Emerging BAM strategies promise instant awareness and reaction to events that take place across the virtual enterprise, even when the processes are emerging and forming. Emerging BAM and real-time enterprise strategies take the goal of timeliness to its logical conclusion. Their aim is instantaneous awareness and appropriate response to events across an entire virtual enterprise. BAM is enabled by the concerted efforts of many technologies, but BAM's real impact will be at the managerial and operational levels. One of the strongly emerging areas around business processes is the visibility and manageability factor embodied in process monitoring. Process participants (both internal employees and external users), managers and executives alike want their own view of the progress of business events, cases, business transactions and technology behavior, while



watching the effectiveness of their business model within policies and constraints created by governments, industry groups, competition spheres and management guidance. This visibility requires a look not only into past behavior, but also at the real-time business events that influence process instance outcomes, and may also help project future constituent behavior to monitor under a number of business scenarios. Analyzing process efficiency and efficacy and aligning process improvement efforts with enterprise goals and objectives involve using software agents (BAM technology) to listen for critical business events, correlating the event data and updating KPIs. When these are combined with KPI-designed dashboards, operational managers can monitor and, thus, better manage the progress of individual work items in real time. This approach enables managers to intercept work, where appropriate, and alter the work item or the process flow to improve the desired outcome. Successful process analytics require investments in event management infrastructure technology, BAM and business intelligence. BPMS vendors will increasingly provide event capture mechanisms for capturing the transient state of actionable information created and used in the process. Event data can be used in simulations, for process mining, for updating dashboard KPIs, for alerting humans to take actions and in a variety of analytical models. Event data must be aggregated, correlated and used to trigger other actions. IT organizations that have successfully implemented BAM in this process context will have the advantage of greater process agility. BAM will have the most impact where real-time analysis and immediate feedback give new power to the "management by exception" models of the past. BAM is a leading-edge architectural and cultural change, and enterprises should target specific applications of BAM rather than using blanket approaches. Through 2020, agility-driven processes will be the targeted goal of both vendors and end-user organizations, putting a premium on the ability to shift process behavior quickly in a managed way. Table 6 - BAM and Business Event Support


or Optional


1. Useful built-in BAM reports, with print preview for various devices and formats.

Required




or Optional


2. Support for shared visibility into process definitions, work progress and dashboard results. Tracking metrics and attributes at the time of execution (such as for cost, time, value and risk) supported for simulations.

Required

3. Real-time capture and correlation of transient business event information to metrics that can be used to trigger actions and process flows or to deduce processes from measurements and event patterns (a leading-edge feature).

Required

4. Monitoring and analyzing operational KPIs to thresholds and historical trends with real-time events (a leading-edge feature).

Required

5. Analysis of work and information progress (flow) with auto discovery for best practices for both predefined and indeterminate processes (a leading-edge feature).

Required

6. Combining process context with historical event context for analysis functions.

Required

7. Establishing thresholds for normal behavior over time.

Required

8. Predicting events and adjusting them to optimize process outcomes (a leading-edge feature).

Required

9. Visually intuitive dashboards. Optional




or Optional


10. Advanced 2-D and 3-D representation of process progress and event data.

Required

11. Dynamic, customizable, animated and interactive dashboards.

Optional

12. Metric definition — setting rules to respond to sets of events and prebuilt KPIs.

Required

13. Managed actions based on alarms and tolerances.

Required

14. Complex-event pattern recognition (a leading-edge feature).

Required

15. Analytic capability (patterns, correlations and root cause).

Required

16. Historical-event analysis (audit and rule refinement).

Required

17. Capturing and exposing events of various types and sources from within the enterprise.

Required

18. Sophisticated event/data recognition and registration (a leading-edge feature).

Required

19. Event filtering and aggregation through various formulas.

Required

20. Dynamic query and analysis module (ex. via drilldown or filtering)

Required

21. Availability to generate queries for analysis at all times.

Required




or Optional


22. User definition and storing of consulting criteria

Required

G. Simulation and Optimization

This includes process simulation and optimization tools that use real-time, historical and estimated data values to detect and suggest process optimization opportunities in a predictive manner. The simulation tools should have tight integration to the development environment to enable round-trip engineering. Simulation is generally of two types — either offline in a planning mode or in-line for adjustments — and tests the effects of proposed changes directly to production. Offline simulation refers to the ability to use generated and/or historical data in simulations of alternative process designs. Process performance data (for example, timing, volumes, resources, costs and arrival sequencing) is captured and fed back into the simulation engine to support design efforts. In-line simulation uses live events and process state data to project the effect of changes on the performance and throughput of a process. This enables business professionals to perform more realistic sensitivity analysis of desired changes. This approach allows these professionals to determine the effects of the changes on the overall work in real time, under the current circumstances, rather than relying on past (historical) performance data to be a reliable predictor of the future. Enlightened organizations will consider the effect of changes across processes as well, and may employ system dynamics to avoid sub-optimization. Optimization is sometimes considered goal-driven, where target outcomes are defined and iterations are then performed until a balance is achieved between conflicting conditions or constraints. Advanced optimization engines can automatically generate new rules that govern the process flow to ultimately gain the desired performance or suggest alternative processes and/or process paths. Database marketers have used analytics such as segmentation, customer value analysis, predictive modeling and optimization for over 20 years to segment and target customers. With the deployment of campaign management systems, targeted marketing campaigns can now be measured for response rates, revenue and customer profitability. However, the uses and audiences for predictive analytics are expanding beyond database marketers. Predictive analysis techniques can be applied to managing processes. All of these



techniques can be used to hone or optimize decisions or processes. Eliminating the risk associated with launching new products, adding new product features or creating new innovative ways to deliver services becomes a valuable feature of in-line simulation and optimization tools. Table 7 - Simulation and Optimization


or Optional


1. Dynamic simulation (discrete and continuous) and animation.

Required

2. Financial and risk analysis. Required 3. Resource utilization and

optimization. Required

4. Test simulation and visual testing support.

Required

5. Real-time event/data feeds. Required 6. Critical-path and value chain

analysis. Required

7. Support for goal-oriented formulas (a leading-edge feature).

Required

8. Heat maps (a leading-edge feature).

Optional

9. Allowing for the highlighting of deltas.

Required

10. Business scenario description, capture and persistence for later reuse, comparison.

Required

11. Support for multiple optimization algorithms (for example, in-line simulation or predictive analytics).

Required

H. Business Rule Management



This provides the ability to abstract and execute business policies and decisions (that is, rules) from the underlying application and make more flexible process change possible with supporting future rules and historical versioning. It also includes the ability to interface to other specialized, external rule environments. As business agility rises in importance, this is accentuated in BPM. Governing business processes with rule engines and associated management procedures represent a vital aspect of a BPMS. The most value comes from changing rules in real time; however, most organizations have placed change procedures and authorization requirements on requests for rule changes. Not all rules are created equal (some are just technical, and some are not volatile). As organizations become experienced with rules and the outcomes associated with their change, different rules will have different authorization procedures associated with them. We think it is more important to change rules in the right time frame. Having an infrastructure that supports real-time changes prepares the business for introducing the most-demanding change parameters. Change can be accomplished by externalizing the rules for instantaneous change, if desired. The phrase "externalizing rules" is used to describe the trend to migrate business rules from being hard-coded in an application to making them available to nontechnical professionals to modify. Simple rule externalization can be powerful for beginners, and most organizations start with simple challenges and grow into more-complex uses of rules. The rules can be expressed as data parameters, decision trees, decision tables or even in a pseudo-linguistic fashion, but the main benefit is the ability to change system behavior and resulting business process execution quickly and inexpensively. Rule changes are often aimed at the action portion of a process, an application or a system. However, rules can also be applied to watch for significant business and technical events that may fall out of normal tolerance or indicate a need to tune a business model for expected or unexpected conditions. These changes are usually more valuable when they can be changed in a real-time fashion, but most organizations have change control restrictions to follow. Heuristics and inference can also be applied to business processes. Not all processes and management problems are algorithmic in nature and can deliver answers that are likely to be correct with a level of certainty. This is true of any diagnostic problem (for example: My process is out of tolerance; what is the cause?). The use of rule engines, in this case, is more heuristic in nature. The answers have certainty probabilities and may not be precise. These kinds of uses are helpful in optimizing human judgment for fixing a process that is out of tolerance, for instance. This requires going through the rules forward (deduction, based on data/facts) and backward (induction, identifying possible paths to a common outcome), unlike normal programming that only goes through rules in a



forward direction. Many BPMSs include rudimentary rule engines that may need to be supplemented for heuristics and inferencing. Table 8 - Business Rule Management


or Optional


1. Prebuilt rule content (vocabularies and multiple rule representations, decision tables, pseudo-linguistic, linguistic with context and decision trees).

Required

2. The ability to support rule groupings around policies and scenarios synchronized with rule rollout procedures.

Required

3. Definition macros, and cascading meanings and rule inheritance (a leading-edge feature).

Required

4. Rule consistency, rule collision and rule overlap and "underlap" checks (a leading edge feature).

Required

5. Easy-to-change, easy-to-test rules and easy-to-visualize rule-firing sequences with expert help.

Required

6. Dynamic rule change supported with the rules separated from the engine.

Required

7. Inductive and deductive problem sets supported (a leading-edge feature).

Required




or Optional


8. Rule management capabilities, including mapping to owners and stewards, change impact analysis purposes and impact analysis (a leading-edge feature).

Required

9. The ability to rerun the engine for a point that has passed — for example, to rerun year-end jobs with 31 December 2008 rules after 1 January 2009. Also, the ability to enter new rules or changes to become effective on a future date — for example, to put in the rule changes for 1 January in December (a leading-edge feature).

Required

10. Rule versioning and release versioning with rollback.

Required

11. The ability at runtime to link scenarios with policies and rules with in-flight.

Required

12. Easy integration with best-of-breed complex rule engines.

Required

I. Management and Administration

This includes management tools to set up, deploy and maintain system and human access, as well as monitoring tools to govern the health of all running aspects of a process, and underlying supporting facilities and components. During the past three years, Gartner has seen business process improvement projects evolve from a department-level initiative to enterprise-level programs and broad-based cross-functional process maps. Cutting-edge enterprises that understand the importance of treating their processes, policies and procedures as valuable corporate assets need to govern and manage them enterprise-wide.



To do this, a BPMS must offer strong role/participant management, security management, and intelligent deployment and system monitoring tools. These basic capabilities are necessary to ensure that the process functionality being distributed across the enterprise value chain is being deployed to the appropriate people and systems, with the right security and governance privileges. Table 9 - Management and Administration


or Optional


1. Advanced security features. Required 2. Self-security administration

with ownership privileges. Required

3. Directory integration, including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Active Directory for assigning users to roles and departments and groups.

Required

4. Process archiving and deployment across distributed systems.

Required

5. User group administration and role-based access to managerial capabilities.

Required

6. Resource and role administration linked to capability profiles.

Required

7. Reporting and administration, including security.

Required

8. Monitoring of assignments and status

Required




or Optional


9. Definition of process metrics and statistics of overload based on multiples variables

Required

10. Search engine to allow location of processes by status, role, etc.

Required

11. Strong encryption algorithms

Required

12. Authentication methods, specify which.

Required

13. Security protocols, specify which.

Required

J. Process Component Registry/Repository

This provides the ability to store all process definitions, components, models, rules and other process metadata that can be browsed by humans and used by systems. This includes both design-time and runtime registry/repositories, and includes a federated approach to metadata. For a BPMS to be effective, the content (and its metadata) created by various users must be shared and managed across the tools that encompass the suite. The technology hub for this metadata management is the process component registry/repository. At the heart of every BPMS is a rich design-time and runtime time registry/repository with complex versioning support for all process artifacts The more-seamlessly integrated the metadata is across the BPMS, the greater the ability to reuse artifacts, conduct change impact analysis and ensure the integrity of information. These repositories contain significant amounts of business process information that can be manipulated, analyzed, exported and reported on. Unless BPMS technologies are architected to work together seamlessly, with a consistent definition of metadata, the ability to share metadata will be constrained. Thus, those vendors that deliver a BPMS based on multiple technology acquisitions have a greater challenge to create a common metamodel and common metadata. (They have greater issues in terms of the ability to integrate metadata across the tools in the BPMS.)



Few BPMSs address complete metadata management, but this is a growing area of focus for BPMS vendors. Ensure that the majority of metadata types that you want to share across users come "out of the box" as part of the repository information model to avoid having to create a lot of customized additions. More importantly, the degree to which the information models in each of the BPMS technologies are consistent is critical to the ability to share metadata. Unless the BPMS has a single versioning set of software that ensures the integrity of updates across components in the suite without further human intervention, then decisions regarding which versions of an artifact (for example, process model or rule) in one tool (such as the modeling environment) should result in updating the previous version in another area (such as the business rule engine or business process workflow engine) will become a manual analysis and governance issue. Table 10 - Process Component Registry/Repository


or Optional


1. Holistic information model: This enables users to easily amend and extend the structure of the predefined information model in the repository.

Optional

2. Tool openness/bridges/generators: These provide users with the ability to move or exchange data from the repository to other tools or other repositories.

Required




or Optional


3. Staging and configuration management capabilities: These enable the automatic capture and storage of metadata content, relationships and transformations, as well as maintenance of the history of those relationships and transformations — a leading-edge feature.

Optional

4. User interface/ease of use: This part of the application enables the user to communicate with the repository.

Required

5. Query and reporting capabilities: These enable users to define and store queries (for reuse) that can be invoked to generate detailed reports from the repository. Querying and reporting also enable users to count and examine what's actually in the repository and, ideally, turns data into meaningful information.

Required

6. Security and administration: Proper security ensures the protection of data against unauthorized (accidental or intentional) access and subsequent modification, destruction, disclosure or delay. IT personnel can help evaluators critique these capabilities.

Required




or Optional


7. Sophisticated iconic and text search capability for business services.

Required

8. Where used, features supporting impact analysis for meta-changes.

Required

9. Electronic software distribution (publish or subscribe) for models (a leading-edge feature).

Required

10. Model merge and versioning/lockout support.

Required

K. Architecture

For the following table, take on the information provided in Table – ACP Technological Environment of Section III – Technology Requirements. Additionally, here is a list of our ERP systems as well as other core systems developed in-house.

1. Custom-off-the-Shelf (COTS) a. Oracle eBusiness Suite v12 b. IBM Maximo v7 c. ESRI ArcGIS v9

2. In-House a. Payroll (RTPL) b. Traffic Management (EVTMS) c. Customer Services Management System (CSMS)

Table 11 - Architecture


or Optional


1. Ease of software maintenance and updates

Required




or Optional


2. Availability of versions for .NET and J2EE

Required

3. Use of TCP/IP protocol

Required

4. System implementations, within proposed architecture, for more than 3,000 users.

Required

5. Integration with legacy systems and 3rd party applications.

Required

6. Service administration (SOA, ESB) included as part of the solution

Optional

7. Capability to manage IT assets such as processes, services, servers, data bases, operating systems, etc.

Optional

V. Additional Information Please provide any additional information, including references, which may be useful. VI. Next Steps/Partnership Please describe recommendations for next steps.



VII. Annex “Solution Implementation Costs”

Description Costs

(US Dollars) Maintenance Comments

Solution (Licensing): Module or Component: Module or Component: Module or Component: Module or Component: Services: Installation Tests Documentation Initial Load or Migration Knowledge Transfer Preventive support Corrective support Customatizations or Development Travel and Lodging Per Diem Total:

Note: When providing information for the above table, take into consideration that In ACP, we work with 4 different environments:

Development Testing Pre-production Production



Annex “Glossary” API: Application Programming Interface is an interface implemented by a software program which enables it to interact with other software. It facilitates interaction between different software programs similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers. An API is implemented by applications, libraries, and operating systems to determine their vocabularies and calling conventions, and is used to access their services. It may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, and protocols used to communicate between the consumer and the implementer of the API. BAM: Business Activity Monitoring is software that aids in the monitoring of business activities, as those activities are implemented in computer systems. It refers to the aggregation, analysis, and presentation of real-time information about activities inside organizations and involving customers and partners. A business activity can either be a business process that is orchestrated by business process management (BPM) software, or a business process that is a series of activities spanning multiple systems and applications. BAM is an enterprise solution primarily intended to provide a real-time summary of business activities to operations managers and upper management. BPM: Business Process Modeling is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require Information Technology involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process, by creating a process master. BPMN: Business Process Modeling Notation is a standard for business process modeling, and provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD), based on a flowcharting technique very similar to activity diagrams from Unified Modeling Language (UML). The objective of BPMN is to support business process management for both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between the graphics of the notation to the underlying constructs of execution languages, particularly Business Process Execution Language. BPMS: Business Process Management Suite encompasses the concept of supporting the managerial approach through enabling technology. The BPMS should enable all stakeholders to have a firm understanding of an organization



and its performance. The BPMS should facilitate business process change throughout the life cycle stated above. This will assist in the automation of activities, collaboration, integration with other systems, integrating partners through the value chain, etc. DBMS: Database Management System is a set of computer programs that controls the creation, maintenance, and the use of a database. ECM: Enterprise Content Management is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists. EDM: Electronic Document Management is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems.

ESB: Enterprise Service Bus consists of a software architecture construct which provides fundamental services for complex architectures via an event-driven and standards-based messaging-engine (the bus). Developers typically implement an ESB using technologies found in a category of middleware infrastructure products, usually based on recognized standards.

An ESB generally provides an abstraction layer on top of an implementation of an enterprise messaging system, which allows integration architects to exploit the value of messaging without writing code. Unlike the more classical enterprise application integration (EAI) approach of a monolithic stack in a hub and spoke architecture, an enterprise service bus builds on base functions broken up into their constituent parts, with distributed deployment where needed, working in harmony as necessary.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an application layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. J2EE: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE is a widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java platform Enterprise Edition differs from the Java Standard Edition Platform (Java SE) in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant,



distributed, multi-tier Java software, based largely on modular components running on an application server. Java SE: Java Platform, Standard Edition or Java SE is a widely used platform for programming in the Java language. It is the Java Platform used to deploy portable applications for general use. In practical terms, Java SE consists of a virtual machine, which must be used to run Java programs, together with a set of libraries (or "packages") needed to allow the use of file systems, networks, graphical interfaces, and so on, from within those programs. JDBC: Java Database Connectivity is an API for the Java programming language that defines how a client may access a database. It provides methods for querying and updating data in a database. JDBC is oriented towards relational databases. JMS: Java Messaging Service API is a Java Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) API for sending messages between two or more clients. JMS is a part of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and is defined by a specification developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 914. It is a messaging standard that allows application components based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) to create, send, receive, and read messages. It allows the communication between different components of a distributed application to be loosely coupled, reliable, and asynchronous. JSR: Java Service Request is the formal document that describes proposed specifications and technologies for adding to the Java platform. KPI: Key Performance Indicator is a measure of performance. Such measures are commonly used to help an organization define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals. LDAP: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for querying and modifying data using directory services running over TCP/IP. Message Queue: Along with mailboxes are software-engineering components used for inter-process communication, or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content. MSMQ: Microsoft Message Queuing is a message queue implementation developed by Microsoft and deployed in its Windows Server operating systems since Windows NT 4 and Windows 95. The latest Windows 7 also include this



component. In addition to its mainstream server platform support, MSMQ has been incorporated into Microsoft Embedded platforms since 1999. It is essentially a messaging protocol that allows applications running on separate servers/processes to communicate in a failsafe manner.

MOM: Message-oriented middleware is infrastructure focused on sending and receiving messages that allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms. It reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple operating systems and network protocols by insulating the application developer from the details of the various operating system and network interfaces. API's that extend across diverse platforms and networks are typically provided by MOM.

MOM is software that resides in both portions of client/server architecture and typically supports asynchronous calls between the client and server applications. Message queues provide temporary storage when the destination program is busy or not connected. MOM reduces the involvement of application developers with the complexity of the master-slave nature of the client/server mechanism.

ODBC: Open Database Connectivity provides a standard software interface for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of programming languages, database systems, and operating systems. Thus, any application can use ODBC to query data from a database, regardless of the platform it is on or DBMS it uses. ODBC accomplishes this by using a driver as a translation layer between the application and the DBMS. The application thus only needs to know ODBC syntax, and the driver can then pass the query to the DBMS in its native format, returning the data in a format the application can understand. OEM: Original Equipment Manufacturer refers to who manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under the purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. OLAP: Online Analytical Processing is an approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining. The typical applications of OLAP are in business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas, with new applications coming up, such as agriculture. The term OLAP was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term OLTP (Online Transaction Processing).



OLTP: Online Transaction Processing refers to a class of systems that facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, typically for data entry and retrieval transaction processing. The term is somewhat ambiguous; some understand a "transaction" in the context of computer or database transactions, while others (such as the Transaction Processing Performance Council) define it in terms of business or commercial transactions. OLTP has also been used to refer to processing in which the system responds immediately to user requests. RDBMS: Relational Database Management System is a database management system in which data is stored in the form of tables and the relationship among the data is also stored in the form of tables. RIA: Rich Internet Application are web applications that have many of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, or independently sandboxes or virtual machines. RPC: Remote Access Protocol is an i that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction. SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks. It relies on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as its message format, and usually relies on other application layer protocols (most notably Remote Procedure Call or RPC, and HTTP) for message negotiation and transmission. SQL: Structured Query Language is a database computer language designed for managing data in relational database management systems (RDBMS), and originally based upon relational algebra. Its scope includes data insert, query, update and delete, schema creation and modification, and data access control

UML: Unified Modeling Language is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of software engineering. The standard is managed, and was created by, the Object Management Group.

UML includes a set of graphic notation techniques to create visual models of software-intensive systems.



OASIS: Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards. Members of the consortium decide how and what work is undertaken through an open, democratic process.

Portlet: Portlets are pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page. Typically, following the desktop metaphor, a portal page is displayed as a collection of non-overlapping portlet windows, where each portlet window displays a portlet. Hence a portlet (or collection of portlets) resembles a web-based application that is hosted in a portal. Some examples of portlet applications are email, weather reports, discussion forums, and news.

Portlet standards are intended to enable software developers to create portlets that can be plugged in to any portal supporting the standards.

WS-BPEL: Web Services Business Process Execution Language is an OASIS standard which provides a language for the specification of executable and abstract business processes. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. It defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration both within and between businesses. WSRP: Web Service for Remote Portlets is an OASIS-approved network protocol standard designed for communications with remote portlets.



VIII. Bibliography Gartner, Inc., Gartner for IT Leaders Tool, http://www.gartner.com, July 2010 Service-oriented architecture (SOA) definition, Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures, http://www.service-architecture.com/, July 2010 Java Message Service (JMS), Developer Resources for Java Technology, http://java.sun.com, July 2010 Here’s an SOA definition we can live with | ZDNet, Technology News, Analysis, Comments and Product Reviews for IT Professionals | ZDNet, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/heres-an-soa-definition-we-can-live-with/490, July 2010 Harnessing the Power of Web Services and Middleware, Stamford, CT: Gartner, June 2003 Chappell, David A., Enterprise Service Bus, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2004 The New Enterprise Architecture, Stamford, CT: Gartner, 2002 Erl, Thomas, SOA: Principles of Service Design, Boston, MA: Prentice Hall, 2008