Once you have a correct set of components, BPM can allow you to recompose them at will into new processes, and SOA can allow you to deploy and execute them on an enterprise (or even inter-enterprise) service bus. But, neither BPM nor SOA can, together or singly, tell you how to define the correct components you'll need at either level, much less how to synch these up. With MDA, we can paint a much clearer and more compelling picture of the BPM-to-SOA approach.

BPM suites represent the fastest-growing discipline in enterprise software. So it’s not surprising that, increasingly, operational data will become process data–-data that’s captured, managed, and organized by a BPM execution engine. There are two major categories of operational data for predictive data mining: process data mining and mining aggregate data, data marts, and data warehouses. Data mining and, especially, predictive modeling, techniques can be used to detect business rule patterns in the process data and now captured rules automates the decision logic.

News earlier this week that IBM is buying French business rules player Ilog for $340m has once again shone a spotlight on this relative backwater of enterprise technology. While business process management systems have managed to move into the mainstream, some of the business rules companies have remained in something of a niche. But what are the options in open source business rules management systems, and why would you want one?

The most viable, agile architectures will be comprised of a blend of architecture strategies, including (but not limited to) service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, process-based architecture, federated information, enterprise integration and open source adoption. How you blend, depends on your business. This article gives the overview of EDA and how to blend it with other architecture technologies.

There is a strong mismatch between the two key standards of BPM: BPMN (the Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL (the Business Process Execution Language). The outstanding work of a team of researchers (Ouyiang, Dumas, van der Aalst and ter Hofstede) that set out to create a BPMN to BPEL compiler since it is often argued to be the missing link in current BPMS architectures. They have made great progress to solve this problem, but their work is still incomplete.