Welcome to the IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) Operations IBM Redbooks publication. This book guides you through an analysis of the concepts that are most important to understand when operating an IBM BPM system.

Each of the contributors to this book has extensive experience in developing the IBM BPM product code, consulting IBM BPM customers as they implement business process applications, and supporting those customers as they run those processes in their production environments. Through this book, the authors explore concepts that every user should well-understand when they are operating an IBM BPM environment.

This chapter includes the following topics:

Investment in any IT operations activity is useful in reducing wasted effort and ensuring appropriate coverage. Business process management projects in general (and IBM BPM systems in particular) typically integrate disparate hardware and software systems. As such, successfully operating an IBM BPM environment benefits from careful planning, organization, and communication.

Every IBM BPM environment is unique. Therefore, every IBM BPM operations team assembles a unique runbook that details the procedures to be followed when dealing with the tasks for which it is responsible. This book does not intend to be that runbook. Instead, it is a guide that you can use when you are constructing such a runbook of your own.

The topics that are included in this book are the most universal topics of IBM BPM systems. You can adapt the experience and guidance that is shared within this book to construct procedures that are appropriate to your own IBM BPM installation.

The IBM BPM product evolved over many years, with capabilities added (and occasionally removed) many times with new operational interfaces or changes to the way administrative tasks are executed. This book is current as of IBM BPM version 8.5.7 and includes detailed descriptions of system capabilities as of that version. It also provides some detailed description of versions 8.5.5 and 8.5.6 where those versions deviate from 8.5.7.

This book provides information that is specific only to earlier versions (for example, 8.5.0, 8.0 and 7.5) on an exception basis or where necessary. Nonetheless, many of the concepts that are described within this book are still relevant to previous versions, although the commands or syntax might be different. In many cases, understanding the contents of this book and consulting the appropriate product version documentation allows you to apply the same principles back to a previous version.

This book is an operations guide for IBM BPM. It is not an application development guide. Although process application developers should follow many important practices and business process architects should consider many recommendations to improve maintainability and performance of their code, those practices and recommendations are not within the scope of this book.

This book focuses on an IBM BPM operations audience. Although this book does not intend to be a comprehensive guide for operating an IBM Business Monitor environment, many of the topics that are included here also apply to IBM Business Monitor as well because of similarities in architecture and heritage.

This publication includes the following chapters:

An Operations view on the Application Development Lifecycle describes critical touch points between application development teams and the operations teams as a process application moves from conception to production release and ongoing maintenance.

Describes the recommended practices when the IBM BPM code is upgraded to a new modification or fix pack level or when you are migrating to a new version or release.

Describes the places where data can accumulate within an IBM BPM system over time and the tools and practices that application owners and administrators can use to remove the data when it is no longer necessary.

Examines some of the most common extension points for IBM BPM systems, including database and security servers, and the most common requirements when coordinating maintenance activities between these systems and the IBM BPM system.

Describes the most important system resources to monitor to detect problems that might be occurring within the system.

In most cases, the IBM BPM operations team is a composite of many teams, each with distinct responsibilities that are working together. The operations staff members also must work closely with several other important teams to get their jobs done. In many ways, the purpose of this book is to define the responsibilities of these extended teams as they relate to IBM BPM operations. These teams are described next.

The following key IBM BPM Operations staff are the primary audience of this book:

The WebSphere administrator also plays an important role in managing many of the artifacts that are associated with IBM BPM Advanced content; that is, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes.

The following important roles and responsibilities also are featured:

Close collaboration between the operations team and the executive sponsor ensures that infrastructure resource allocation decisions are in line with the priorities of the IBM BPM project as a whole. For example, the delivery of many non-functional requirements (performance, disaster recovery, and so forth) can incur expensive infrastructure costs. Alignment with the executive sponsor is critical to ensure that these non-functional requirements deliver business value that is appropriate to their cost (conversely, clear articulation of the business value frequently helps to justify that cost).

Understanding the implementation of the business process applications helps the IBM BPM operations teams to interpret resource monitoring data and to evaluate configuration properties. A close working relationship with the process application development teams helps the operations team gain this deeper understanding.

As described in Business Process Management Design Guide Using IBM Business Process Manager, SG24-8282, instituting a center of excellence across all IBM BPM projects helps to define goals and vision across the enterprise, discover and prioritize new processes that should be brought under automation, and share infrastructure resources across all process automation projects. This publication is available at this following website:

The Center of Excellence (see Figure 1-1 on page 5) is a team that includes representatives from executive management, the business community that is using the processes, the application development team that is building the processes, and the IT teams that are operating the environments on which the business processes execute.

Each of the teams that are responsible for the success of the project collaborates well with the center of excellence that is defining the priorities and helping to enable effective collaboration. In many cases, consolidation (rather than isolating the operations teams that are supporting the IBM BPM environment) leads to the most efficient execution.

Clearly defining responsibilities is required within the organizational structure to avoid contradictions and unnecessary duplication of work. However, inefficiency and wasted effort is dramatically reduced when the teams that are working together understand each other well and can contribute to some portion of their collaborator’s work.

Occasionally, we encounter organizations in which the various operations teams are almost entirely isolated from each other, which leads to inefficient execution. Consider the following examples:

Many more examples are common in IBM BPM installations. The examples that are listed here give you a sense of the types of delivery delays that conflicting objectives (or even simple misunderstanding of project priorities) might cause.

Throughout this book, we w use some terms to describe the elements of an IBM BPM system and the process applications that run on it. This section defines those terms and places them within the context of the IBM BPM system.

IBM BPM recommends a three-cluster topology (Application, remote Messaging, remote Support), as described in Section 3.2 of the IBM BPM v8.5 Deployment Guide. We frequently refer to this topology as a golden topology. For more information, see IBM WebSphere Business Process Management Deployment Guide: Using IBM Business Process Manager V8.5, SG24-8175, which is available at this website:

This guide is an excellent reference that should be required reading for operations teams that are supporting IBM BPM solutions.

Beyond the basic considerations, Chapter 5, “Maintaining IBM BPM-dependent systems” on page 69 of this book describes many of the interactions between IBM BPM and the systems that form its extended topology (including network and routing, databases, and external service providers).

In many cases, IBM BPM installations make assumptions about services that they “inherit” from the larger infrastructure topology in which they are placed. Services, such as web security, redundant networking, and connectivity with external services (whether within the same datacenter, across data centers, or across infrastructure providers), must be considered. These assumptions often are handled by using corporate policy; however, it is never a good idea to take them for granted without verification.

Every IBM BPM installation consists of multiple environments, each comprising an IBM BPM cell that is mostly autonomous. In addition to the production environment that executes core business processing, there is a (production class) development environment in which business processes are constructed. The following other pre-production environments also are common:

Because IBM BPM stores critical business processing information as metadata that is attached to the business process instances, it is sometimes tempting to use this metadata as the official system of record and retain the primary copy of this information for auditing and historical purposes. However, this practice is discouraged because it overloads the use of the IBM BPM runtime databases, which are optimized for operational activities that are associated directly with helping the business find and complete the most important tasks that are required to do their job.

The accumulation of completed business processing work and executing reports against it (which typically feature different access patterns) degrades the ability of the system to support mainline processing. Therefore, it is better to integrate the business process management system with a dedicated system of record that manages and archives the required primary data for the business and to integrate with a dedicated business monitoring solution for reporting purposes.

For the past several years, IBM offered IBM BPM as a managed and hosted cloud solution. This offering allows subscription-based pricing and separates the infrastructure management tasks (including WebSphere and database administration) from IBM BPM administration. This configuration allows IBM BPM on Cloud customer operations teams to focus their efforts on the IBM BPM administration tasks. For more information about operations within the context of the IBM BPM on Cloud offering, see Working with IBM BPM Business Process Manager on Cloud for basic daily Operations, REDP5377, which is available at this website:

For more information about IBM BPM on Cloud (including demonstrations and trials), see this website:

As with many complex tasks, many expert resources are available to help you meet your operations goals, whether those goals require short mentoring or full outsourcing of the operations tasks. Many IBM Business Partners are available to help with these tasks and IBM also offers assistance in this area. Contact your IBM account team to find the solution that works best for you. The following resources are available: