I attended the Gartner BPM Summit last week in San Diego. It was gratifying to be among the growing cadre of true believers in what BPM can (and has) accomplished. Jim Sinur of Gartner has a nice description of the conference here.
Yet from our perspective, there’s still a bit of drama to be resolved in the definition of what BPM is (thus the title of this post, which borrows from a daytime TV soap opera).
More than one presentation I attended showed BPMS technology as a set of interlocking gears. Depending on the speaker’s definition, a good BPM suite includes workflow, BI and BAM, content management and middleware. Everyone agrees BPMSs are model-based. And everyone agrees that at the heart of the BPMS – the central gear – is an execution engine.
But the real BPMS drama centers on what, precisely, makes this gear turn — and not incidentally, what this gear is “made of.” Unfortunately, some of the BPM foot soldiers I talked with at the BPM Summit tend to ignore this central gear — the BPM execution engine — as an afterthought. They seem to be saying, “As long as the process runs, who cares what it runs on?”
To us, that thinking is both a quixotic quest to rid BPM of IT pesky developers and a recipe that allows IT to make BPM just another unintegrated island of computing in the enterprise. BPM practitioners have to remember their IT history: every single technology that’s come along that attempts to “cut out” IT — and especially developers — has eventually been relegated to a minor role in the larger picture. We know for a fact that the ideal of business end users diagramming their processes, punching a button and having those BPM applications integrate with other systems, automatically deploy and run reliably without IT in the loop is simply a pipe dream.
For BPM to succeed, the question of how IT will integrate BPMS technologies, how developers will be able to combine BPM applications with other systems and whether or not the execution engine is proprietary are all critical questions. (And of course, we think ActiveVOS answers those questions beautifully.)
It would have been impossible to attend the BPM Summit and not come away excited about BPMS technology. I just hope that the BPM thought leaders who attended the BPM Summit don’t succumb to the pipe dream of building enterprise systems with “pretty pictures.”
