Configuration

Once the business process model is designed and verified, the business process
needs to be implemented. There are different ways to do so. It can be implemented
by a set of policies and procedures that the employees of the enterprise
need to comply with. In this case, a business process can be realized without
any support by a dedicated business process management system.
In case a dedicated software system is used to realize the business process,
an implementation platform is chosen during the configuration phase. The
business process model is enhanced with technical information that facilitates
the enactment of the process by the business process management system.
The system needs to be configured according to the organizational environment
of the enterprise and the business processes whose enactment it
should control. This configuration includes the interactions of the employees
with the system as well as the integration of the existing software systems
with the business process management system.
The latter is important, since in today�s business organizations, most business
processes are supported by existing software systems. Depending on the
information technology infrastructure, the process configuration phase might
also include implementation work, for instance, attaching legacy software systems
to the business process management system.
The configuration of a business process management system might also
involve transactional aspects. Transactions are a well-known concept from
database technology, where a transaction manager guarantees that application
programs run as transactions and obey the ACID principle: atomicitiy,
consistency, isolation, and durability. This means that transactions are executed
in an atomic all-or-nothing fashion, they transfer a consistent database
state into another consistent database state, they do not interfere with other
transactions, and transaction results are durable and survive future system
failures.
While in business process management database applications with transactional
properties play an important role to realize process activities, transactional
properties can also be defined at the business process level; a subset
of the process activities form one business transaction, so that either all
activities in this set are performed successfully or none is executed, realizing the
atomicity property.Unfortunately, the techniques that guarantee transactional
behaviour indatabase systems cannot be used for business process transactions, since they
are based on preventing access to data objects by locking, and locking data
objects during process instances is no valid option.

Once the system is configured, the implementation of the business process
needs to be tested. Traditional testing techniques from the software engineering
area are used at the level of process activities to check, for instance,
whether a software system exposes the expected behaviour.
At the process level, integration and performance tests are important for
detecting potential run time problems during the configuration phase. Once
the test subphase is complete, the system is deployed in its target environment.
Depending on the particular setting, additional activities might be required,
for instance, training of personnel and migration of application data to the
new realization platform.