BPM took center stage on Day 2 of IBM Impact, which used to be a SOA/BPM event but somehow seems to have morphed into a cloud/social/mobile/collaboration event.  Wait, isn’t that Lotusphere?  It was sometimes hard to tell.  The key BPM feature touted on Day 1 – identifying other process experts at runtime and contacting them right away by instant messaging – I know I saw on the Lotusphere main stage back before Y2K.  Whatever. Fortunately, it turns out that BPM v8, which GA’s in June, is much more than this.  I should say the “BPM portfolio”, which now includes Business Process Manager and Operational Decision Manager (ODM), a merging of WebSphere Business Events and ILOG Business Rules Manager.  Simplifying the portfolio was one of Phil Gilbert’s key objectives, and v8 is an important first step.  The same kind of business-oriented UI design that went into the Process Center BPM repository has been added to the ODM Decision Center repository, what they call the Business Console.  In fact, now Process Center, Decision Center, and Blueworks Live all have a similar iTunes-y Facebook-y look and feel.

The runtime user experience is also new.  They kind of admitted that both the old Lombardi Process Portal and the IBM Business Space UI were not the greatest, and the new portal again has that iTunes/Twitter/Facebook influence, with activity streams, favorites, @mentions, etc.  More impressive to me is the new task UI (“Coach”) designer, which features reusable composite controls that dramatically simplify authoring of complex task user interfaces without so much javascript and css code.  For example, a data entry and a graph control can both point to the same data and communicate with each other automatically without scripting.  IBM has also carried forward real-time collaborative editing from Blueworks Live into the Coach designer.  Very cool.

Mobile was featured heavily at Impact, and IBM has a free BPM Mobile app, native on iOS, ready to go.  IBM’s approach to mobile BPM is that customers want to write their own mobile apps, so rather than focus on a canned mobile client, they are emphasizing their new, documented REST APIs that allow customers to embed BPM easily in their mobile apps.  Snippets of code from IBM’s own mobile app will be made public as well.

IBM still hasn’t resolved their FileNet BPM issue, but content-enabling IBM BPM is getting a lot better.  BPM can connect to FileNet, Documentum, or any CMIS-enabled ECM system, introspect the repository objects and metadata, and display the results in new doc list and doc viewer widgets in a Coach.

A major theme from Gartner last week was “intelligent business operations” that combine events, rules, and real-time analytics to drive adaptive processes.  IBM execs touted the integration of BPM and ODM to achieve this, but I had a hard time seeing anything more than making the Decision Center repository look a lot like Process Center.  The primary runtime integration between them is still a Decision task in BPM calling a Decision in ODM rule engine and then branching in a gateway.  Nothing new or even especially interesting about that.  Gartner’s “i” goes the other way, starting with the event: an event stream is processed by rules that triggers some adaptation in the process.  Can IBM do that?  It took asking a guy to find the guy who knew the guy who could 1) understand the question and 2) show the dynamic/adaptive piece of the BPM/ODM integration.  So thank you for the demo, Laurent Tarin and Deepak Elias!  I would say it’s about 90% there.  The last 10% still requires writing code against the APIs.  Here are a few ways it would work:

1. Ad hoc start.  I think that’s what it is, sort of looks like an error start but it’s not an event subprocess.  If the trigger occurs, skip the human decision task and automatically approve or automatically do something else.  From a BPMN perspective, a hack, completely outside the spec.  BPMN doesn’t have a good way to model this specific behavior but IBM could have done something a bit closer to legal, I think.  Now, if only ODM could trigger that event…

2. Message boundary event or event subprocess (or possibly Conditional event), the more correct (and maybe more limiting) way to model event-triggered behavior in BPMN.  Now, if only ODM could send that message…

3. Critical path parameters.  Process Designer has a critical path view that lets you view and edit the priority and SLA of each task on the critical path.  Now, if only ODM could modify those parameters…

4. Resource assignment.  Process Designer lets you model task resources with variables and rules, so in theory at runtime some combination of events and rules could adapt a running process to reassign the resource.  If only ODM could do that…

I am assured that ODM can do all those things if you are willing to code to the APIs.  In other words, the hard part is basically done, but there is that last mile problem.  There are just a few action paths possible, so it doesn’t seem it would be that hard to replace that API code with point-click configuration.  I think to win Gartner’s MQ they would want to do that.

Overall, I am impressed with BPM v8.  It seems a big step forward, and I look forward to trying it out.  Oh yeah, did I mention that it can locate a subject matter expert at runtime that you can consult via instant message?  It can do that too.