As the year draws to a close (okay, I admit it, I’m already in holiday mode), there are inevitably the articles and blog posts about “the future of [insert anything here]”, and BPM is no exception. TIBCO’s doing this with a podcast, where Jeff Kristick, their VP of product marketing, gets together with Peter Fingar, author of BPM: The Third Wave and Janelle Hill of Gartner.
Unfortunately, it’s not an interactive conversation, but rather a series of clips from interviews, so the moderator talks a bunch, then inserts a clip from Jeff, then talks some more, then a clip from Peter, and so on. Still, there’s a lot of interesting concepts in here for 15 minutes on the treadmill with your iPod, such as the notion that BPM implementations remain tactical in nature and departmental in size because the industry has failed to produce a standard BPMS based on an abstract BPMS data type, which would allow end-to-end process management. Janelle Hill has some good words to say about process agility, and how the shift to explicit process management allows organizations to perform constant incremental process improvement rather than a single big bang approach once every 10 years. She goes on to say that by building process models and creating process visibility, it raises the awareness of all the process stakeholders and sparks further improvements and better designs: in other words, get something in there to start, then let the process participants decide what should be done next, a strategy that I always try to use in BPM implementations.
You can find all the podcast landing page here, or a direct link to the MP3 for this podcast here.