Let’s consider a content-centric business process within a business area that wants real-time business analytics. The IBM Business Process Manager is a great choice to implement this process. It includes the content management functions for dealing with the content, the process design and delivery functions for managing the work, and the content and process analytics tools for understanding what’s happening within the business. We’ve also got a forms tool available in the platform and we’re going to use it for all of the user interfaces, other than work delivery, which will come from the native user interfaces of WorkplaceXT. You’ll already have noticed we’re using IBM FileNet specific terms and we’re assuming you have at least a basic knowledge of the IBM FileNet systems and components, so hopefully you do and can read on.

Our fictitious process has various documents that trigger the process and are accumulated as the process progresses. if you were starting this design process today, you could be using Case Manager as our example is a typical case management scenario, but we’ll keep that particular design behaviour for another post. This design discussion here will deal with the changeable design for the content and process engine as part of the Business Process Manager package.

The end goals are to provide the customer with analytics they need to run their business, the processes that enable them to do their work and the secured documents that support and initiate the processes. There are hundreds of processes within the IBM FileNet customer community that easily fit these criteria, so hopefully you’ll be able to pick something similar in your own experience.

Rather than describing the entire design process, in future posts we’re going to highlight some issues that occur if you expect the solution to be changeable just because it’s using the platform, rather than specifically designing for change.