Process Versioning in IBM BPM

Process Versioning in IBM BPM

A process undergoes lot of changes in an IBM BPM life cycle along with multiple continuous implementations. The IBM BPM System Architecture should be potent enough for handling multiple versions of process instances.

BPM suites that are coming now a day’s comes with pre-packaged utilities so as to migrate the process instances from an obsolete version to higher versions. However, a process instance in an older version may not be always possible to migrate to a higher version, due to external system dependencies, when the external system itself would have undergone a version change along with the process. This is again in-line with the process data Vs business data. The lines of battle between process data and business data have to be drawn carefully in such a way that no data on external system should be a part of the process data. A better way for holding reference to external application data is to hold reference to the unique business key attribute of the external system.