BPM: Agent determination/maintenance best practice

[andy.m.catherall@kraftfoods.com]

All

In working with the BPX type individuals who are designing our BPM processes in their Pools & Swim-lanes, they of course define steps in the flow as being the responsibility of a "Role".

At the high level, this makes sense. To extend the classic "Leave request/approval" scenario, we would have


a)      The initiator - the employee

b)      The approver  - the manager

This works when describing the process to the business, but is insufficient when it comes to actually building the BPM workflow. We also need to include the logic to describe which specific manager it should go to, for the given initiating employee.

This means that, at development time, tying the step to the UME Role is inappropriate and insufficient. If we had one role for "Vacation approver", the work item would be delivered to the inbox of far too many managers in the firm.
It is clear that we need a more detailed level of granularity, but it is not one we can deliver at the security layer. We could not justify a different, unique, role for each manager. It would provide no security benefit and would be impossible to administer. How would you ensure that you had linked certain employees to the appropriate manager at run time, rather than at design time?


However in the BPM world, there seem to be limited alternatives.

a)      There's no Org Structure to refer to.

b)      We could tie the step to a custom service to find the right agent. However, this adds a degree of development overhead, especially if you also are keeping in mind the future maintenance of the agents & (perhaps) the logic.

c)       I had hoped we could use Business Rules Management (BRM), especially as CE 7.2 provides a web-edit facility for users. However apparently, BRM 7.2 will only permit a single result at the moment. Not until CE 7.3 can a result-set be returned. Whilst a single result is appropriate in my example above, it is insufficient in my real-world case...

Then , when it comes to the maintenance of the agent logic, we would want to ensure that it was easy to do, and in the most appropriate hands (usually, in my experience, that is not IT) so that the logic is kept promptly up-to-date with personnel changes. It seems that some maintenance screens are necessary here.

So, how have people addressed these requirements in BPM?
Any references or articles available?

Thanks
Andy
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