Changing market drivers, increasing competitive pressures, global presence and rapidly evolving customer needs are placing greater pressure on businesses to streamline their processes and take control. The “B” in BPM stands for Business, and these are the people who interact with the process on a regular basis, who understand the operational limitations, and who have ideas for improving the process. There is an increasing desire among the business users to get into the driver’s seat while creating business applications. Business users want to manage the design and execution of business processes. This is especially true for business processes where IT has been unable to keep pace with changing business needs. Oracle BPM enables business users to take control and drive improvements for their processes.

For years, the challenge for BPM Suite vendors has been how to match BPM’s “business-driven” promise to the technical complexity of automating core business processes. At one time, business-driven meant process analysts working with the business to create process and use case models as “business requirements” that would handed off to developers for implementation. For today’s BPM market, business-driven demands more. It means empowerment of process analysts and business users themselves to directly participate in the implementation. That requires a new generation of tools, not just for process authoring but for management at runtime, tools designed for business users. Of course, programmers and traditional IDEs continue to play a vital role in BPM.

Implementing a proactive and risk-based information technology (IT) governance, risk management, and regulatory compliance (GRC) approach enables companies to better manage compliance costs and streamline compliance and business processes through increased automation.

GRC has always been an important if somewhat abstract concern to businesses, particularly companies that are publicly traded and/or in heavily regulated industries. Within the last decade, firms have developed a new and more concrete sense of urgency, as C-level leaders have been forced to address regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel I, Basel II, and HIPAA, as well as mounting stakeholder and public demands for stronger internal controls and greater accountability.

This special report asks the question: “Is it possible for both the business process and Business Architecture Modeling approaches to share a common modeling language and might BPMN 2.0 satisfy both?”

Successes and Achievements