Customer Reviews

Business Process Management with a Business Rules Approach: Implementing The Service Oriented Architecture

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Business Rules are just one area of advancement within trendy IT thinking today yet we need to know how they should work with BPM tools. This book tries to lay out a vision for two development methodologies. The business rules section is a bit sparse but there are plenty of good references on this subject. I particularly liked the chapter devoted to process convergence, which takes the BPM concepts and applies them to a data processing environment. Another strong point is that the book's case study provides many examples to reinforce points under discussion. The index is well organized. The illustrations that are sprinkled throughout the book also add humor and clarity.

The book could be an invaluable tool for designing SOA-based business intelligence. However, many typing errors exist in the text. Some statements in the book appear to contradict each other. The discussion on the business intelligence, Chapter 5, is difficult to follow. For example Figure 5.4 is very unclear. Specifically, how do the data from the dimensions in the data warehouse move from the data warehouse to the MQE? Where is the link from the data warehouse to the MQE? If the author can clean up all these issues, the book could be an excellent one for designing SOA-based business intelligence.

This is a wonderful little book. The author explains in simple language how teams actually build business processes with today's software. Today's IT strategies are very complicated and it's hard to determine the correct approach for solving problems. The case study in the book clarifies how BPM and Business rules software works. Also, the author has included many diagrams to show how these solutions should fit together. If your company is considering BPM, this book will show you how to make it happen.

I was going to stop reading after Ch 2 of this book, since it was way more than I wanted to know about bulldozers, but Chapter 3 got into some useful information and detail on how the technologies integrate. Each chapter built and finally tied it all together: how BPM, BPML, BPEL, BI are used in SOA. Good big picture overview of all the technologies role. I especially enjoyed the discussion of brokers to retrofit legacy apps.

I like Tom's approach to explaining BPM and a rules approach using a real world example. The book had numerous typo's, and I found it hard to believe it made it through the publisher with so many errors. I also found the overall organization of the book to be fair, but the details on each section were not so. Being in the industry, I was expecting more for the money. This book provides a good overview, but not recommended if you plan on moving from discovery into implementation.

As a knowledgeable architect wanting SME, this did not provide much help for me. Plus: OK treatment of BPEL and reasonable examples of code. Con: Riddled with ridiculous and poor cartoon illustrations. Too many descriptions of services as probable recapitulations of author's projects. Flow diagrams disorganized. Instead of teaching a subject area, this is a 1st person memoir of uninteresting, unchallenging projects.

Not only did I personally find this book complete with practical information, my IT department has as well. The review is similar to what my business is experiencing and has hit the nail on the head with the approach we need to take to steer our firm into growth mode, internally and in our market. I have recommended this book to other friends as their businesses are in a similar hold pattern as our was/is and they too have commented they found this book to be a valuable resource.

In this book, Tom describes an incredibly powerful approach to application development: how to build systems that use Business Processes that decide with business rules. If you follow the industry trends in this area, this development approach is considered to be critical to achieving "business agility". If you had to read one book on either Business Process Management or Business Rules, this is the book to read.

I'm sorry, perhaps I'm missing the nuggets of gold other reviwers claim to have found but I simply could not finish this. It is a complete mess of information in my opinion. Sections ramble on and continuity is completely non-existent. The level of gibberish is also extremely high in places. Take this example:

"A .NET component is an Internet service that customers access from a variety of manners including Web browsers and spreadsheets. BPM and Business Rules software enables the publication of these Web services. By publishing the Web service, your customers and trading partners easily incoporate them into your Internet services. This is know as exposing the Web service to the public." (p22)

This paragraph offers nothing to either the business or IT ends of the potential audience for this book and, in my opinion, is representative of the book as a whole.

This book helps you figure out the different roles of BPM, Business Rules, and Business Intelligence through a series of case studies written in simple English. It's goal isn't to guide you through your project from start to finish, but to get you thinking about how you want to accomplish your goals. I have been working with BPM technology for several years now and I wish I had this resource for my earlier projects.