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Organizations continue to realize tangible benefits from past investments in portal projects. Some businesses are now further exploiting their portal investments to facilitate effective collaboration within and outside their organization. In a recent IDC study¹ that was sponsored by IBM, 90% of respondents indicated a need to automate more of their business processes. Many clients are already tapping into their portal solutions, providing electronic forms to streamline paper-based processes, saving both costs and time. In addition, a number of clients are seeing a need to incorporate workflow capabilities into their portal solutions, as well as present their enterprise data to end users using mash-ups and other visual displays.
The ability to integrate human tasks with automated ones in a business process is proving to be increasingly important as organizations become more geographically dispersed and workflows become more dynamic. Direct human intervention and input might be required at critical junctures of a business process execution, in order for it to complete successfully (for example, the reviewing and approval of a loan application). Typically, at a minimum, people need to monitor business processes to make sure that they are performing as expected.
The IBM® SOA Configuration® for Enabling Human and Business Process Interaction is designed to help you get started by providing technical guidance, documentation and key portal and process capabilities for your existing service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. This configuration has emerged from IBM's collective, extensive experience gathered from numerous customer implementations spanning a myriad of industries, and therefore, consists of best practices for implementing process automation and human task management solutions in an SOA environment.
IBM SOA Configuration for Enabling Human and Business Process includes:
- Custom configuration guide that documents the installation, configuration, and deployment considerations for the following IBM products:
- Product decision guides for selecting and adopting appropriate technology capabilities
- Case studies on the people and process SOA entry points
- Best practices whitepapers
- Recorded demonstrations of how to assemble complex business solutions with minimal development effort.
You can access all pertinent information and documentation for the previously mentioned configurations in the IBM SOA Configuration Information Center, which is updated frequently.
Complementing the IBM SOA Configurations is the IBM SOA Sandbox, which provides access to online trials and best practices that can help developers and architects begin the SOA journey at any one of the SOA entry points.
¹An Evaluation of Build Versus Buy for Portal Solutions, December 2007, IDC (R. Perry, K.Quirk), Sponsored by: IBM
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