Schema for integration of an enterprise BPM backbone
Business Process Management software has turned from science project to infrastructure imperative. As organizations seek to weave adaptive, process-wise applications into the fabric of their information processing infrastructure, it becomes imperative for organizations to adopt a rational, extensible architectural pattern that is strong enough to enforce meaningful guidelines and flexible enough to encourage adoption. KROME, the Knowledge Rules Orthogonal Modules Enterprise framework, is such an enterprise BPM schema.
For business process owners, KROME is a means to focus rules discovery, governance, and process improvement efforts on policies and procedures at a level that is both manageable and meaningful—focus that combined with a sound rules management methodology will yield actionable, predictable, timely results.
For technology pundits, KROME is an architectural framework which follows the separation of concerns philosophy to disaggregate process functionality into reusable objects. Such reusable objects fit business rules invocation and business process orchestration into a Service-Orient Architecture (SOA) world-view. The result is a framework which allows the business to describe application composition as a mash-up of known, stable components that delivers rapid results without sacrificing data integrity.
KROME reduces uncertainty and risk in large-scale BPM implementations by focusing attention on manable, reusable modules. KROME establishes a pattern that allows organizations to focus on the underlying rules that drive business value rather than on details of technical plumbing that are otherwise necessary concerns in unlocking that value. KROME addresses the problem of ‘multiples’:
- Multiple BPM software vendors,
- Multiple BPM software versions,
- Multiple BPM application ‘slivers’,
- Multiple funded BPM projects,
- Multiple development sites (onshore/offshore),
- Multiple professional services vendors,
- Multiple tenancy – shared and virtual infrastructure on internal/external cloud computing platforms.
KROME provides adapters for early BPM adopters.
Following the KROME schema in conceiving and implementing an enterprise-wide BPM backbone initiative gives an organization a major advantage: It enables the leveraging of process assets across divisions, and across funded projects, without incuring the multiples of cost typically associated with building reusable code.
When coupled with a ‘Build for Change’ capable BPM software platform, like Pegasystems’ PRPC, KROME design minimizes the damage often done by early efforts at adoption by providing a flexible, plug-and-play environment for later adaptation of processes. Reducing the cost of failure drastically improves the speed of adoption by encouraging learning and exploration in short, iterative cycles. KROME is protective enough for novice BPM implementers, but robust enough to satisfy advanced consumers and power-users.
