Traditionally,
business information systems have been developed with a functional orientation,
often resulting in “silos” of services and information. However, end-to-end
business processes that must span silos can't adapt to change as business needs
evolve—they're fragmented and embedded deep within systems.
Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises to relieve the pain of business software
integration. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is comprised of loosely
coupled, highly interoperable application services that represent business
services. These services interoperate based on a
formal definition independent of the underlying platform and programming language,
and the most widely used services definition is Web Service Definition Language
(WSDL).
SOA is independent of development technology. The software components are
reusable because the interface is defined in a standards-compliant manner.
Further, SOA provides a methodology and framework
for documenting an enterprise and can support integration and consolidation
activities. High-level languages such as BPEL take the service
concept one step further by providing a method of defining and supporting
workflows and business processes.
ActiveVOS
products enable better process collaboration by business analysts and SOA
architects, using current open standards, for model-driven development and
integration. Close collaboration is essential because technologists do not know
business processes and rules, while business analysts do not use technical
development tools. Iterative process and requirements definition is normal, and
best done with shared diagrams, documents, and models.
ActiveVOS
Designer and ActiveVOS Designer for Business Analysts are fully compliant with
the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN is a
business-oriented process modeling technique that helps organizations
standardize the modeling of business processes that span applications and
business partners. With BPMN, users at all levels have greater visibility and
control over their business processes, especially those related to Business
Process Management Systems and the underlying Service-Oriented Architecture and
web services. BPMN is an important development for any BPM or web services
initiative, as it provides a shared language between consultants, business analysts,
technical architects, and IT developers, with no part of the process model
inaccessible. The business and IT communities pursuing business process
improvement are therefore able to communicate using a common visual vocabulary.
ActiveVOS
bridges the technical gaps between business-level modeling and process
operations through a bi-directional transformation between BPMN and Web Service
Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL). This
model-driven approach to building SOA applications offers greater
responsiveness to business change and provides real-time visibility into
business processes. When effectively implemented, it improves business agility
by letting you modularize legacy, packaged, and custom applications, and
orchestrate them in easily changeable business flows.
ActiveVOS
Designer is based on Eclipse, an open-source community for both the rich-client
platform and the development platform. It can be installed as a standalone application
or, optionally, on the top of an existing IDE.
ActiveVOS Designer and ActiveVOS Designer for Business Analysts provide visual modeling tools that:
·
Use BPMN-based visual process
modeling to design:
o
Process related objects
(activities, gateways, processes, events, connections)
o
Business goals and sub-goals
o
Key performance indicators (KPI)
·
Simulate and optimize business
processes.
·
Generate process documentation
(either in HTML or MS Word format).
·
Analyze and validate a process
model.
·
Transform a process model to a
BPEL model for deployment.
·
Create activities from existing
web services.
·
Manage and track process model
changes and document both “As-Is” and “To-Be” process
models.