Appian has a link to Gartner’s newly-published report on BPMS selection criteria here (free registration required). Gartner has the 10 major areas of functionality used to develop the criteria listed as following:
- Human task support: Executing human-focused process steps
- Business process/policy modeling and simulation environment
- Pre-built frameworks, models, flows, rules and services
- Human interface support and content management
- Collaboration anywhere support
- System task and integration support
- Business activity monitoring (BAM)
- Runtime simulation, optimization and predictive modeling
- Business policy/rule management support
- Real-time agility infrastructure supports
For each of these, the report provides a description of the functionality and why it’s important, then provides a list of what to look for when you’re evaluating that particular functionality. For example, they have this to say about real-time agility:
We believe that making changes to process flows in real time is less important than making changes at the correct or relevant time.
A sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with — in fact, I think that I said pretty much those exact words during my course earlier this week. They proceed on with several paragraphs of explanation about the factors involved and what to look for, then the dish up their “factors to seek out” list, which includes things such as BPEL support, and early warning through rules and complex event pattern matching.
Excellent reading, and a very practical checklist for anyone evaluating BPMS.
Bet you didn’t notice that there was no mention of the following: http://weblog.itredux.com/2005/12/why_buy_a_bpms_.html
Wonder when Gartner will start listing open source products alongside commercial proprietary offerings?
Your reference is to an article about Intalio, which doesn’t really seem related — the Gartner article is about BPMS evaluation criteria, and doesn’t mention any vendor. It may not be relevant to consider “open source or not” as an evaluation criterion for a BPMS unless you specifically work for an organization that embraces open source: many organizations aren’t yet comfortable with open source products.
As for your question about Gartner and open source, I’d love to see them start including open source BPMS in the BPM Magic Quadrant report and other reports that do direct vendor comparisons, that would go a long way towards raising the profile of some good products that are still flying under the radar of most organizations.