Agent determination/maintenance best practice

[Gijs Houtzagers]

Andy,

Is it not possible to refer to the object structure in OM from BPM?

 

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of
andy.m.catherall at kraftfoods.com
Sent: vrijdag 25 februari 2011 19:15
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: BPM: Agent determination/maintenance best practice

 

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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