This is the second edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 checklist post. Today, I will try to clarify what a complete BPMS is. To me, a BPMS must support both process design and process execution, therefore a simple process modeling tool with process simulation capabilities does not qualify as a BPM 2.0 product. Also, a BPMS must support both web service orchestration and human workflow interactions. You can think of it as two sides of the same coin, one facing back-end IT systems, the other facing front-end human beings. As a result, and at bare minimum, a complete BPMS has three main components: a process design tool, a process execution runtime, and a workflow user interface.

If you want a more complete BPMS, three additional capabilities are needed: support for complex business rules, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and a way to manage the versioning of documents that are attached to process instances. It does not really matter if these capabilities are offered natively by the core BPMS, or are provided by external components, as long as the life cycle of business processes is preserved, with zero code and one-click deploy.

And if you want to be really fancy, three more things can be added: a complete Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a metadata repository, and a business intelligence suite that will help you slice and dice the data coming out of the BAM infrastructure. Once you reach that level of sophistication, you have a complete BPMS that can be used to manage virtually any kind of business processes, within the most complex environments.

Now, let’s take a look at how Intalio is building such a thing. First, we developed a process design tool (using Eclipse as underlying workbench), a process server, and a workflow suite. Second, we picked Corticon, Celequest, and Alfresco as prefered partners for business rules, business activity monitoring, and content management respectively. Integration with these products is done through our Demand Driven Development program, and all three products come for free as part of our Community Edition. Third, we selected ServiceMix, Infravio, and Pentaho for the Enterprise Service Bus, metadata-repository, and business intelligence suite respectively. At present time, we are still working out the details of integrating with Infravio and Pentaho. Integration with ServiceMix was completed two weeks ago, which gave us the first JBI-compliant BPM engine. More recently, we also added support for Apache AXIS 2.0.

If you’re looking for a complete BPMS, give Intalio a try.