Better Tools for
Business Processes
Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite 11g
delivers social BPM capabilities; user-centric, business-
friendly tools; and a unified process foundation.
Oracle recently announced its next-generation business process
management (BPM) suite, Oracle Unified
Business Process Management Suite 11g.
Caroline Kvitka, Oracle Magazine senior
managing editor, sat down with Hasan
Rizvi, senior vice president, Oracle Fusion
Middleware and Java development, to get
the details. The following is an excerpt from
that interview. Download the full podcast at
oracle.com/magcasts.
Oracle Magazine: Why do companies need
BPM?
Rizvi: Very few organizations today are homogeneous. They are typically organized by
functions—customer relationship management, sales, marketing, production, and so on.
When you are working within those functional
silos, it’s very easy to do what you’re doing, but
as soon as you start going across those organizations, things get a little more interesting.
Similarly, on the IT side, there are systems that
service these functional organizations, but as
soon as you start tying these systems together,
that’s when things get a little more challenging because of technology issues.
The business processes that power your
organization typically run across these different organizations and functional silos.
Business process management basically
gives you the ability to model, automate,
monitor, and optimize some of these processes so that you can achieve better efficiency and business visibility.
BOB ADLER
Oracle Magazine: What key customer chal-
lenges did you to address in Oracle Unified
Business Process Management Suite 11 g?
Rizvi: The challenges we looked at were:
How do you make it easy for people to work
together in terms of defining and executing
the business processes? How do you work
across a diverse set of tools and technologies?
And how do you integrate your technology
environment so you can actually start auto-
mating these processes? So the three key
elements in Release 11 g are the collaboration
and social elements that define what we call
social BPM, user-centric tools that help busi-
ness users to more easily interact with pro-
Hasan Rizvi, Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion
Middleware and Java Development
cesses, and a much more integrated solution
that includes a unified process foundation.
Oracle Magazine: Can you touch on some of
the social BPM capabilities and their benefits?
Rizvi: There are three things that I want to
highlight. First, we provide process spaces,
which are workspaces where you can see all
the different aspects of the business process
and where you can interact with the relevant
people who touch that business process. For
example, we have a model process space,
where all the people who are working on
defining a particular model can collaborate.
