Architectural considerations for a BPM / BAW solution, grouped as they come up in design reviews:
- Process scope and granularity: what is one instance (an order? a line?), instance lifetime (hours vs years - long lifetimes need migration strategies), sub-process vs linked process vs separate BPD (reuse, independent deployment), case vs process.
- Data: system of record stays outside BPM (BPM holds references and working copies - claim check); business object design (small, typed, versionable); exposed business data only for search; shared BOs for parallel work; retention and deletion of instances (GDPR).
- Integration: facade per system in toolkits, synchronous vs asynchronous (message events, UCAs, delayed response), idempotency and retry, timeouts, an ESB / API gateway in front of legacy systems, error handling to a human queue.
- User interface: coaches in Workplace / portal vs custom front end via REST; house style toolkit; mobile needs; document handling (BPM document store vs ECM).
- Security: identity source, SSO, teams mapped to groups, segregation of duties (four-eyes), data visibility per role in coaches, audit trail, REST authentication for integrations (CSRF, API keys on CP4BA).
- Non-functional: expected instances per day and open tasks (sizing, database growth, cleanup jobs), response time of coaches, availability topology (clusters / replicas), DR, monitoring (event manager, failed instances), performance testing with realistic data.
- Environments and delivery: Process Center / Workflow Center with tracks, snapshot naming, environment configuration (env vars, EPVs, servers), CI/CD with the REST APIs, test automation (REST + browser), instance migration policy per release.
- Governance: toolkit ownership and versioning, naming standards, documentation rules (question 354), review checklist, licensing (VPC on CP4BA).
- Platform choice: traditional BAW vs CP4BA containers vs SaaS - decided by heritage artifacts, case / content needs, operations skills and cloud strategy.
A one-page decision record per topic (what was chosen and why) is worth more than a large architecture document; the BPD documentation fields then point to it.
References