I have posted some articles in the past on migration strategies, taken closer looks at process layers and provided some best practices for jBPM, both touching on very specific parts of your BPM strategies. I wanted to revisit the topic of best practices but then on an Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise level where we talk about getting control over your business processes with JBoss BRMS.

Introduction
To start with we need to take a closer look at the landscape and then peel back the layers like an onion for a closer look at how we can provide BPM projects that scale well. Figure 1 shows that there are several component layers where we will want to focus our attention:

• Process Initialization Layer
• Process Implementation Layer
• Process Repository
• Tooling for business users & developers
• Console, reporting & BAM dashboards
• Process Interaction Layer

Figure 1: Enterprise BPM landscape.

The process initialization layer was covered in part I of this series, where I presented some best practices around you, your customer and how processes are started.

The process implementation layer which will be covered here is where the processes are being maintained, with help from the process repository, tooling, business users and developers that design them. Here you will also find the various implementation details, such as domain specific extensions to cover specific node types within our projects.
The console, reporting and BAM dashboard components are the extended tooling used in projects to provide business value or information that can be used to influence business decisions. Best practices in this area will be covered at a later time.


Finally, the process interaction layer is where you processes will connect to all manner of legacy systems, back office systems, service layers, rules systems even third party systems and services. Best practices in this area will be covered in a later article.
Process Implementation Layer