Combining BPM and BRMS

Everyday I see more and more frameworks trying to combine BPM and BRMS. Tom Baeyens posted “Blending Processes And Rules With jBPM” in his blgo some time ago. Yesterday IBM twitted their new site “Combining flexible BPM and business rules for faster ROI“. It’s nice to see more focus on combining both.

IBM say if you have conditions similar to Large number of field employees dedicated to sales, Complex business processes with unacceptable error rates, Lack of business user control over processes and decisions, Increasing regulatory pressure, you probably need to look at combining BPM with BRMS. Here are the questions you can ask to find it out:

• Are you looking for more control managing decisions within your business processes? Would you like to be able to make changes more quickly?
• Are you able to personalize pricing, promotions, product offers (etc.)? Would you like to be able to increase personalization?
• Are you able to effectively manage differences across geographies or sales channels?
• Are there compliance issues related to this?Are you able to test how a decision change impacts process behavior? Can you simulate decision outcomes before deploying changes?

It’s nice to see there’s a focus on combining BPM and BRMS, and i’m waiting there’ll be focus also on combining entity lifecycles to that. Then we’ll have HOW, WHY and WHAT of Zachman together.