More on BPMN - BPEL roundtrip in Oracle BPA Suite 10.1.3.4

Apologies for the delay in the post. I was busy getting the Oracle BPA 10134 out. BTW, this version contains further enhanced BPMN to BPEL round trip.

We all agree that business processes are living assets. Business and IT might update a process simultaneously, according to their requirements. For example, a business user might update a process while an IT developer is adding implementation details. IT developer refinement involves providing physical bindings and transformations, but can also include adding additional implementation specific processing steps within, or contiguous to, what the business analyst considers a single step. An approach of IT “refinement” respects the logical model as a constraint, thus enabling the logical model and the physical model to evolve in parallel without breaking the connection between the two. BPA 10134 provides a BPMN-BPEL bridge that allows for concurrent updates by business and IT, constantly granting real-time insight into the new state of the business process definition.
If this was the original process definition as specified by business and shared with IT:



Subsequently, if a business user changes the process model as shown in this BPMN diagram - a new activity "Asset Verification" has been added by business user:

Meanwhile, the IT folks have already started implementing the process and they have added a new step called "Audit Approval" as it is mandated by compliance guideline. ANd IT feels that business needs to be aware of this change. Thats the reason IT added this activity to the outline view. This is how the updated IT outline view would look like:








If the IT user did a merge, the outline will now contain a merged view.




Now when IT decides to upload the modified definition to business, the business user will see the diagram as follows:








The business user has the option to accept or reject changes proposed by IT.
Thus changes made by business can be shared with IT and the ones made by IT can be shown to business. Thus the tool provides for a collaborative business and IT environment.