Often the Gartner BPM conference seems to me the same-old same-old, but I have to say I am getting some valuable new perspective at this year’s event in Baltimore. The new wrinkle this year is what Gartner is calling iBPMS, the “i” meaning intelligent. It’s really shorthand for a number of new technology-based capabilities that have been swirling around the edges of BPM for a couple years, but which have now graduated to the Magic Quadrant checklist: adaptive, predictive, sensor- and event-aware, rule-driven, context-aware, real-time, social, mobile, cloud-based, maybe even gamified… It sounds like a generational change in BPM technology, although it’s not clear from Gartner’s examples that these customers think they are implementing BPM. No matter, because once these features go on the BPM MQ checklist, BPMS vendors are compelled to add them. Suite vendors like Pega and Appian seem a bit ahead on the “i” features, but what is more interesting to me from the exhibit area is the number of new companies getting into the BPM arena with many of these capabilities in more standards-based and less hermetically sealed offerings. The core of what Jim Sinur is calling Intelligent Business Operations is real-time operational analytics based on a sense-and-react paradigm. Events from physical sensors, software adapters (including BPMS), and external information feeds are continuously monitored, filtered, and aggregated, then processed by rules, resulting in triggered actions. This sounds like BAM, and it is, except the target is not simply a dashboard or triggered exception handler process, but some adjustment or adaptation in the running process. Clearly events, rules, and analytics, mainstays of BPMS technology for several years, are key components, but they now must be more deeply embedded within the orchestration itself, not mere bolt-on appendages. Rule-engine based suites like Pega have a natural head start, but based on past history, iBPMS will make many of these features commonplace across the BPM landscape in short order. This is going to pose some challenges for process modeling, as BPMN, for example, will be hard-pressed to express this adaptive/reactive behavior. It does not all fit within a strict orchestration paradigm. But there will be ways to express it visually, I am sure. You don’t have to join the “BPM is dead, long live ACM” camp. For me, Gartner BPM 2012 is evidence that BPM is still thriving, still evolving to meet a wider set of customer expectations.
Gartner BPM – Better This Year
About the Author: Bruce Silver
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Bruce, Thanks. I agree with you on the content of the conference.
As I pointed out three years ago: Either BPM vendors will do as ACM already does or they will simply go away. I did originally suggest to consider ACM an adaptive process management approach, but neither the BPM nor the ACM folks were willing to take that step. Yes, everyone will be iPBMS on their marketing brochures pretty soon. Let me just say that iBPMS alone is not yet ‘adaptive’ in the sense that it allows business people to build processes on the fly.
As you point out there is a challenge to present the ‘adaptiveness’ in BPMN, especially if you want to do it upfront. There is no problem to represent the content of a dynamically created case and its history as a flow. A Gantt chart is a lot better suited but to be BPM it has to be BPMN …
Yes, BPM is thriving but as you said it is a long way from AS-IS and TO-BE flowchart analysis projects. And thats what we predicted with ACM, no more.
Let me add, that not only Appian and Pega cover the complete iBPMS function set, but also ISIS Papyrus does – and it adds the all important content creation and capture functions as an embedded capability. Why aren’t we covered by the analysts? As a European vendor I have given up on trying to explain the American mindset. 😉
In retrospect we should have called ACM Adaptive-BPM or iBPMS or like … I still see that we take a much longer perspective than iBPMS does right now. We embed the strategic governance in the technology and dont need a bureaucracy to do so.
Max,
thanks for comments. I think they move the discussion forward, which is not always the case when the topic is ACM and BPM. If you can live with iBPMS as a “big tent” that includes ACM, I think that’s great! I can’t explain what products the analysts cover and don’t cover; it probably has to do with money. I would say, to your point, that it’s not that BPMS vendors were “unwilling” to make their products more flexible and adaptive, but unable at the time. It’s hard but not impossible. What is good about Gartner putting these qualities on the checklist is that now vendors are forced to act on it.
–Bruce
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