Companies have been looking for ways to open, or expose, key pieces of their enterprise applications to customers and partners since the Internet took off as a business tool. They want the efficiency, cost savings, and ability to conduct business around the clock that access to key applications offers.

But so far, Web services have yet to fulfill their potential to automate processes that improve service and drive profit while making life easier for employees, customers, and partners. Self-service change-of-address applications are fine, but they lack the ability to make the kinds of smart business decisions that competitive businesses must make daily. Online customer self-service applications cannot make decisions based on the worth of the customer; for example, such as whether to delay a customer's order by using batch processing for an address change or to ensure that it takes effect immediately, despite a slightly higher cost to the company. That's where an older technology with a new twist comes in: "smart" business process management (BPM).

Smart BPM, Web services, and portals are colliding to create an opportunity for companies to take common Web services, such as customer self-service, to the next level of intelligent automation. Portals offer a familiar network environment for shared applications. Smart BPM - BPM driven by business rules - can provide the missing intelligence needed to fully automate complex transactions. Smart BPM allows business people to set business priorities - not the programmers who implement them - to guide how rules influence the way work gets done. The ability to change business rules frequently without rocking the system is the key to agility.

BPM is not a new technology, but traditional BPM alone is not enough to support mature and nuanced transactional automation. Smart BPM, built on sophisticated rules engines, joins process automation and complex Web services transactions through best-practice rules and fine-grained decision intelligence at the point of integration. Business rules engines and process automation can add the intelligence and agility to Web services that companies need if they are to realize the full benefits of exposing key applications.

What's Not to Like
Smart BPM relies on business rules, workflow, and enterprise application integration (EAI) to automate haphazard and cumbersome manual processes. On their own, these process technologies did little more than push and assign work. Desktop workflow applications streamlined processes, eliminating manual steps and paperwork. EAI linked back-office systems and automated transactions with point-to-point interfaces. As Web services have matured, many organizations have exceeded these efficiencies to expose cost-effective business transactions and services to partners and employees. Companies are using Web portals supported by XML and other Web service technologies to bypass application interfaces entirely, allowing users to submit expense reports without logging into an ERP system, for example. Ramp-up time for Web services is usually only weeks or months, and the ROI equation is proven.

Unfortunately, the Web service implementation model doesn't scale well in dynamic enterprises. Part of the issue is the classic software development model. IT developers start with a concrete set of use scenarios that they methodically "phase" into the portal. However, IT must juggle new scenarios and capabilities, exception handling in old scenarios, modifications to back-office Web services, and shifts in business priorities. It's not long before the development team is fighting an uphill battle, the portal stagnates, and the push is on for a more agile solution.

But the classic software development model isn't the only barrier to rolling out successful, sophisticated Web services. Typically, Web services lack the process intelligence that brings business-level discernment - the use of if/then logic - to make sophisticated choices about how to process transaction input. One problem this causes is that the more Web services proliferate, the more challenging it becomes to ensure that a given transaction applies the proper service (there may be several "change address" Web services available, for example, although one may be for partners and another for customers). The burden of choosing the right one in a given context rests with the application, which adds to the programmer's task.

Moreover, Web services are usually stateless. The management of policies, security, and best practices is placed on the portal developers - an open door for inconsistencies. And when business policies, practices, or rules change, portal developers must code the logic changes into the individual applications because their applications aren't smart enough to adapt on their own.

A better approach is to architect a smart BPM layer that abstracts the exposed Web services as a logical business process. Such a software layer applies global policies, business rules, and best practices to the entire portal platform. It manages and executes business processes centrally, tying exposed services into enterprise applications. It's smart because it takes advantage of advanced decision technology to resolve nuanced business rules in real time.

While the how of a process falls to Web service developers, smart BPM systems apply who, what, when, and where to the business context of a request. It executes the appropriate Web services via an integrated rules engine that models corporate policies, business rules, and best-practice knowledge.

Smart BPM Adds Agility
Smart BPM is crucial to Web services because business rules should be managed by the business, not programmers. Web services governed by smart BPM tailor their actions and responses to the applications calling on them, in effect creating custom services for each user. Intelligent systems leverage inference technologies to choose the correct process based on the context in which it is used. This eliminates the need for IT personnel to aggregate a set of rules for a specific process, and makes the whole system more adaptable to change. Smart BPM systems scale well because IT staff can concentrate on adding new functionality, exceptions, and Web services instead of hand-coding every rule change into each system it touches.

For example, an address change sounds like a simple Web service. But consider a large national bank. A "simple" address change may consume more than 70 process flows and involve close to 40 back-office systems. While many flows concern themselves with the "hows" of changing the address information in the back office, many more will need to deal with elements like correspondence, fraud prevention, and auditing. The rest of the context involves delegated business rules up-selling or cross-selling based on relative customer value, subscription status, demographics, marketing initiatives, change notifications, and so on.

If a smart BPM layer manages all of these flows, the different portals involved don't have to know any of the address change details. If the bank changes a customer value policy, the rule is instantly enforced across the enterprise. There's no need for IT to aggregate the rule and distribute the change to multiple systems. This saves money and time, but its higher value lies in what it can do for Web services as a whole.

Smart BPM's rule-guided intelligence promises to simplify and coordinate Web services for real-world business agility, something that will be critical to all business in the 21st century. While exposing Web services is key to creating automated systems, true agility comes from the intelligent use of business rules, policies, and best practices. Smart BPM is one way Web services are adapting to their own momentum and success.