What’s ahead for BPM?
April 30th, 2009 by Alex Neihaus
In a very interesting post on his Gartner blog, Jim Sinur asks, “What is the greatest hurdle facing BPM?” He then describes three “top choices” on which (unsurprisingly) we have an opinion.
The first challenge Jim raises is “enabling people,” writing “While BPM has been helping with ‘heads down’ process workers for a while now, BPM needs to move to supporting more people activities.”
We violently agree. ActiveVOS was the first BPMS to ship a complete and standards-based capability to integrate human tasks with automated business processes (check out Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect Analyst Insight Edition podcast on BPEL4People). ActiveVOS is specifically designed to integrate people flexibly into end-to-end, completely integrated processes. And, boy, has this been a winner for us in our product. I can’t think of a customer who has deployed ActiveVOS in the last two quarters that hasn’t integrated human workflow into their processes. The reason this has been so popular among customers? It’s now easy to do…and it’s open.
The second challenge Jim talks about is “leveraging information.” Jim writes:
While BPM works well with structured data and content management capabilities, BPM needs to embrace events beyond the progress of business activities in the known paths of a pre-defined process. Process will need to support more information around the context in which the process is running in at the moment. What is the effect of markets, geographies or the state of the partner chain that the process is operating within right now? This means close ties to complex event processing and intelligent decision management. This would not only include the current state of the process, but would include past trends to optimize process outcomes.
This is the proverbial softball for ActiveVOS. Only ActiveVOS includes an integrated CEP engine. Why integrate CEP into a BPMS? Because if you do it well (and we think we did), you make it possible for BPM applications to add CEP capabilities as needed, delivering just the kind of flexibility Jim is seeking. In ActiveVOS, CEP is a deployment time option. You don’t have to change the the process to take advantage of CEP, and the normal BPMS execution engine generates all the events and stream data needed for the CEP processor. It’s a snap to leverage information this way…and thereby overcome one more hurdle to widespread BPM adoption.
Finally, Jim writes about “scope of impact.” Jim says, “Expanding BPM’s influence to innovative end to end processes that are linked to important value chains will test what BPM really brings to the party.”
We couldn’t agree more. We believe that the sustaining competitive difference between ActiveVOS and “pretty picture” BPMSs (the ones that claim you can punch a button and magically deploy a complex end-to-end process) is our emphasis on integration. We believe in model-based execution. We are true believers that business analysts have to be driving the development of business processes. But we are also fervent believers that to achieve the impact Jim describes requires BPMS technology that integrates all the existing applications and data that are central and not-so-central to the process. Those resources are likely to be inside the IT infrastructure today — and the BPMS needs to maniacally focus on making it easy for IT to leverage them into new processes. I read Jim’s comments to mean that far from going around IT, he’s calling for exactly the kind of collaboration between end users, business analysts and IT that we are designing our product to promote.
We think the road ahead for BPM has some curves…but is otherwise clear ahead.
Tags: BPEL4People, BPM, BPMS, gartner
