《Garnter报告：2007年BPMS 魔力象限》笔记

英文全文：
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/bea/vol1/article2/article2.html

 

 

纯粹只玩BPM的厂商继续占据领先位置，但“经典”BPMS的应用场景已由应用基础设施变化为模型驱动的、整合的环境。

 

魔力象限图：

 

从产品角度，评估BPM厂商的10项标准。

1. 流程执行与状态管理引擎：
   Process execution and state management engine: This orchestrates the sequence of multiple process interaction patterns and maintains the state of process instances, activities and steps among humans and systems based on the metadata and process flow that were modeled. Supporting H2H, H2S and S2S interactions, case management and compensating transactions.
2. 模型驱动的设计和开发环境：
   Model-driven design/development environment: This is a drag-and-drop modeling environment that includes process wizards, templates and "what you see is what you get" development tools to model and architect all process artifacts, including process design, human interaction, rule interaction, user interface, system interaction and electronic forms. Features such as search, version management, repository partitioning, publish and subscribe services, and check-in/check-out.
3. 文档与内容管理：
   Document and content management: This is document and records management technology that is capable of storing, archiving, indexing, picking and tracking all types of content (for example, structured and unstructured data) inside and outside the context of a process flow. Features include folder management, document and image indexing, management of structured and unstructured data, and document archiving, as well as document security management.
4. 用户协同：
   User and group collaboration: These are design time and runtime human teamwork tools. The design time collaboration tools provide development tools for business users and IT to help close the communication gap between the two groups. Runtime tools provide work collaboration facilities so that work teams can drive work to completion faster and can detect, suggest and change system behavior for optimal system performance. This area includes shared work queues, project portals/rooms, role-based development, instant messaging/blogs and community bulletin boards.
5. 流程组件注册与仓库：
   Process component registry/repository: This stores all process definitions, components, models, rules and other process data that can be browsed by humans and called by systems. It supports search, version management, repository partitioning, publish and subscribe services, and check-in/check-out of all software components created and orchestrated at runtime.
6. 系统管理与维护：
   System management and administration: These tools set up and maintain system and human access, as well as provide monitoring tools to govern the health of running systems. They include role management, security management, system management monitoring, LDAP integration and Active Directory deployment tools.
7. 业务规则管理：
   Business rule management: The ability to abstract and execute business policies and decisions/rules from the underlying application and to enable more-flexible process change. This includes event-based rules, inference-based rules, rule test and debugging, rule simulation/what-if analysis and rule templates.
8. 在线与离线的仿真与优化：
   In-line and offline simulation and optimization: These are process simulation and optimization tools that use real-time, historical and estimated data values to detect and suggest process optimization opportunities. Simulation tools should have tight integration with the development environment to enable round-trip engineering. This functional area supports predictive analysis (financial and risk), concurrent process and rule simulation, a simulation repository, optimization algorithms and round-trip engineering.
9. 流程事件管理：
   Business event management, business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence (BI) management: Business monitoring and reporting tools are used for governing and alerting business managers on current and changing business operation behaviors. Features include event listeners, alarms, triggers of online analytical processing/BI reporting, key performance indicator dashboards, graphical process monitoring and process discovery tools.
10. 系统连接性：
    System connectivity: These tools enable system architects to publish and subscribe system services, choreograph service interaction and set up bidirectional connections to various, back-end business applications via prepackaged system connectors, such as Enterprise JavaBeans or SOAP, technical adapters, service support, enterprise service bus, data transformation tools and application adapters.

 

个人感受：翻阅了这10条技术标准，一个产品之所以只能成为工作流(Workflow)，而不是业务流程管理(BPM),是因为工作流只具备了流程执行引擎、模型设计等基本工具，而在与流程相复合的功能，如上面提到的文档管理、业务规则管理、事件管理/BI/BAM/DashBoard、流程模拟与优化以及流程运维管理做的不够深入。
但有意思的是，似乎先进的BPM产品所具备的业务层次上的BPM能力超越了目前国内业务应用现状，很多信息化建设还仅仅处于起步状态，这些信息化建设在初始阶段往往只需要一个工作流引擎即可。

加上本地化因素、市场因素、国外产品难以导入等，造成BPM产品在国内曲高和寡（高端应用除外！）。

 

 

BEA ALBPM

优势：

1. 可以让业务人员参与到IT构建中，参与到业务流程的全生命周期；
2. 开放的标准，较强的H2H,H2S,S2S功能；
3. 在将支持业务人员参与到流程驱动的解决方案，包含SOA与WEB2.0

需要小心：

1. 与Weblogic产品未完全整合，如与Weblogic Integration的整合，包括文档、管理；
2. BPM价值主要基于产品的创新，可能难于与追求商业结果的BPM购买者形成共鸣；
3. 仅支持设计时的仿真和优化。。？？

IBM

优势：

1. 整合所有资源推动客户接受BPM，这些资源包括全球服务、大学推广、业务咨询以及合作伙伴生态系统；
2. 拥有广泛的、强势的BPM-enabling技术，帮助客户做大作强SOAs，并达到BPM级别；
3. 有提供给业务人员和分析师的工具Business Modeler、Business Monitor，支持在设计、监控、分析等阶段的流程改进；
4. 已围绕SOA构建了卓有成效的软件和IT服务生态系统，对SOA与BPM的市场有很强的预见性。

需要小心：

1. 不只是一个BPM产品，BPM战略包括很广泛的产品线，包括Tivoli、Webshpere、Lotus、FileNet和Rational。参与BPM改进生命周期的角色不能形成统一的产品体验；
2. 改变已部署执行的流程依然需要IT人员支配；
3. BPMS产品和专业服务不支持business-user-driven，不具备敏捷开发的特征。

Oracle

优势：

1. 用户可以渐进的增强BPM能力，如可从Oracle BPA套件起步，然后增加使用BPEL Process Manager和Oracle BAM；
2. Oracle BPA套件和SOA套件使用同一套元数据(Process Blueprint)，支持业务人员和开发人员在设计时协作；在BPA套件设计的流程保存为BPMN格式，通过Process Blueprint可转化为BPEL格式；Oracle JDeveloper可以编辑这些模型。这样可形成闭环管理，尽管是人工进行；
3. BPEL Process Manager有很强的人工流程管理功能，如投票、组分配和时间期限等；
4. Oracle事件驱动型的BAM较强，可以可视化的轻松创建内置的度量指标和仪表盘（尽管需要有很强的数据理解能力）

需要小心：

1. 由于根据不同角色而定的的设计和开发环境，不同角色的业务人员和开发人员的交流将受限。例如，跨角色的模型交流需要从不同的工具中集中版本；
2. 总体的用户体验为传统的开发方法论，而不是模型驱动、协作和敏捷的方法；
3. 模拟功能只能使用BPA套件在设计阶段支持。

Tibco

优势：

1. Business Studio2.0是一个基于Eclipse的统一开发环境，支持由业务分析师和开发人员使用。适应BPEL2.0标准，支持可重用的流程片段，可通过XSLT和语义验证转换为BPEL；
2. iProcess套件使用了事件驱动架构，包含一个强大的、向导式的BAM层，可对流程进行深入的检视；
3. 对很多标准有很好的支持，包括XSLT\XPDL\BPEL\BPMN等；流程可以保存为XPDL、可以很轻松的从BPMN转换为运行时BPEL，和其他的BPM工具有互操作性，例如IDS Scheer；
4. Business Studio设计仿真是高度图形化的。他利用历史改变数据、允许并行的比较设计。

需要小心：

1. 流程改进的整个周期是不完整的。与SOA的整合、与开发者的整合尚不完整。因此，完成人工交互流、消息流和服务编排的开发过程较复杂。因为角色和阶段的分离，导致往返工程较困难；
2. Tibco产品“久经世故”，价格高昂，不易对规模较小或不成熟的组织产生吸引力；
3. 对一些复杂内容交互的流程支持较少，比如说case-management-style的流程。

 

Cordys从最初定位于应用平台中间件，目前正扩张到BPMS阵营。C3为近期最新发布的BPMS，在很多方面得到显著增强，例如BPM建模和执行，平台与集成支持，安全与治理，还有案例管理。该厂商未包含在此报告中，是因为报告数据搜集时没有赶上其最新产品发布的时机。