Essential Business Process Modeling

Example: Employee Benefits Message Broker

This example illustrates how a hypothetical company might use BPM to implement a message broker. Company X is building a new messaging infrastructure for its various employee benefits systems. As illustrated in Figure 11-3, at the center of this infrastructure is a BPM-based message broker for medical and life insurance that manages interactions between the Human Resources department (HR), the Payroll department, and HR Portal applications and systems (see following explanation).

Enterprise Service Bus

A message broker is a central hub for application communication in a single enterprise. The grander notion of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) , being promised currently by seemingly every integration vendor and solution provider, describes a decentralized, distributed, extended-enterprise messaging router. Applications scattered across several distinct companies can plug into a common ESB bus and communicate with one another. This model, if and when it becomes real, is a marked improvement over today’s state of affairs, in which most companies do not even have an intraenterprise broker, and even for those that do, communicating with other enterprises is a comparatively complicated solution.

A good presentation of ESB, including the use of BPEL for orchestration, is found in O’Reilly’s Enterprise Service Bus by Dave Chappell.

Figure 11-3. Employee benefits ...