Business Process Management is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to continuously improve processes. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process".

Business Process Management (BPM) refers to the closed loop, iterative management of business processes over their entire lifecycle. It includes designing, optimizing, documenting, communicating, deploying, evaluating, updating, and retiring processes. Well-managed companies have always had robust, but time consuming, mechanisms for performing all of these functions.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are a new family of software systems that automate and simplify the task of managing business processes over the entire lifecycle. In the past, IT-enabled business processes were implemented within the boundaries of particular software applications (Examples include Customer Relationship Management systems and Supply Chain Management Systems) Even when processes required multiple applications to be coordinated, the locus of control would remain within a specific application, which would call on others as and when required. With a BPMS, the process management system specializes in orchestrating every business process, and will call on other applications for services, as required.

This means that processes become distinct entities that can be managed and reused in other contexts too. Existing processes may be recombined to create new processes. The business management can own their processes, while the underlying IT infrastructure can be managed by the IT staff.

BPM is NOT BPR: Business process reengineering is a methodology that emphasizes re-creating processes from scratch. This can result in huge improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, but can be time-consuming. Even worse is the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. An organization’s processes represent its accumulated wisdom, and existing applications often include highly customized algorithms that are corporate assets. The key is to ensure that these assets are preserved, and are available for use wherever and whenever they may be needed.

BPM, on the other hand does not require the use of any particular methodology. It automates and reuses existing processes, and thus capitalizes on past investments. BPM and BPR are complements, rather than substitutes. Each of them increases the value of the other.

BPM is NOT EAI: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) refers to a family of technologies that are used to get applications to work together. These may be used simply to move data between applications, or to create composite applications that reuse functionality that is already available from existing applications. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) are relatively new developments in EAI. A BPMS, however, sits above the EAI/Services layer, and calls on these resources when required as it executes a business process. Some BPMS vendors assert that their systems work even without an Integrations layer.

BPM is NOT ERP: Enterprise Application Integrations (ERP) is monolithic enterprise applications that automate many standard business processes. Implementing such a system is usually a complex and expensive undertaking that can take years. While they incorporate many “best practices”, they can be rigid, and usually require the company to adopt the processes defined within the system, rather than the system adapting to the practices specific to the company. As with BPR, there is also the risk of losing highly customized algorithms that are corporate assets when replacing legacy applications by ERP.

BPMS are relatively modest implementations that can be rolled out rapidly. These are low-cost, and highly adaptable. Processes can be added and refined incrementally, and recombined into composite processes.

BPM is NOT Six Sigma: Six Sigma is a methodology for creating and improving processes. It is independent of any technology. As with BPR, Six Sigma is a great complement to a BPMS.

BPM Technology

BPM System (BPMS) is sometimes seen as "the whole of BPM". Some see that information moves between enterprise software packages and immediately think of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Others believe that "modeling is the only way to create the 'perfect' process," so they think of modeling as BPM.

Both of these concepts go into the definition of Business Process Management. For instance, the size and complexity of daily tasks often requires the use of technology to model efficiently. Some people view BPM as "the bridge between Information Technology (IT) and Business".

Example of Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern: This pattern shows how business process management (BPM) tools can be used to implement business processes through the orchestration of activities between people and systems.

Conclusion

Advantages

Although SNMP works over TCP and other protocols, it is most commonly used over UDP that is connectionless and vulnerable to IP spoofing attacks. Though it is frequently being used in most of the network configurations, it is highly vulnerable to various security attacks. So in modern network architectures it is being implemented in combination with other security based protocols and encryption technology.

The Purpose of JAX-RPC

Multiple vendors provide compatible implementations of the JAX-RPC standard. JAX-RPC enables portability of Web services across these multiple compatibility implementations. JAX-RPC provides support for document-based messaging. Using JAX-RPC, any MIME-encoded content can be carried as part of a SOAP message with attachments. This enables exchange of XML documents, images and other MIME types across Web services. JAX-RPC supports HTTP level session management and SSL based security mechanisms. This enables the development of secure Web services.