Even the simplest BPM solution has the potential to have a major impact on your organization. Companies are often surprised that a successful pilot or proof-of-concept business process application can quickly become mission-critical. When you fully embrace BPM, you should understand the implications; the processes you create, automate, and deploy run your core business. Without a solid platform and practices, your users become idle and your business comes to a halt. Therefore, when you build the initial BPM platform, it must be scalable, available, and secure, and be sized appropriately to address your foreseeable load.

One of the initial steps of planning for the shared infrastructure element of BPM is to design the eventual platform that will host the BPM system (BPMS) and its various process applications. This step can be difficult because, at this early stage, you might not have firm requirements for the various process applications (built on the BPM platform) you will implement, deploy, and maintain on the BPMS. Nevertheless, your shared infrastructure must handle initial process application development and scale to support user adoption of initial process applications and also expansion for new process applications. This endeavor can be demanding for the individuals who are responsible for creating a BPMS for those first 18 months.

Areas of responsibility for the shared infrastructure element of a BPM CoE include the following key focus topics, with respect to the BPMS platform that is necessary for implementing, deploying, monitoring, and improving business process applications.

• Availability
• Performance
• Scalability
• Security
• Application governance

In addition to defining these areas, the shared infrastructure element of a BPM CoE must also engage in activities that continuously advance and implement them.

Ultimately, at a lower level, this group (shared infrastructure element) is responsible for areas such as hardware, the continuous “greening” of platforms, administration, deployments, and many traditional IT areas. However, all of these tactics must ultimately support one of the goals in the previous list. The purchase of four rather than six servers is not the goal; the goal is guaranteeing 95% availability.