Following the keynote by Prof. Scheer, we had the Gartner tag team of Jim Sinur (who covers BPM overall) and Michael Blechar (who covers modelling, information architecture, and model-driven architecture) on the subject of “What’s New With BPM?” They did a great back-and-forth presentation on stage, although they did end up with the inevitable plug for the upcoming Gartner BPM summit in San Diego.
The audience, on survey, were self-declared as more than 50% IT, which surprised me a bit, considering the earlier comments from IDS Scheer about how 80% of their users are now business people.
Blechar started off by talking about how the requirement for modelling comes from people looking for ways to rapidly prototype, design, assemble and orchestrate business processes; being able to compose business processes from services while maintaining a corporate context; moving away from high level of enterprise architecture to the reality of a business architecture that’s controlled by the business people. Sinur followed with Gartner’s definition of BPM as a management practice and structured approach, how the current focus on optimization/measurement goals are bringing modelling and execution closer together, and the business process maturity model.
There were a number of concepts that I’ve seen in other Gartner presentations, both at their BPM summit last year and in webinar, such as how responsibilities for BPM are assigned across the enterprise (business, IT, or shared), and their “gear” diagram of BPM suites with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the centre and the 10 essential functionalities surrounding it. New to this diagram from previous versions is collaboration and inline optimization, which Sinur discussed at length. He made the point that this doesn’t all have to come from one vendor, saying “BPM is an architecture, not a technology, a BPM suite is one way to implement that architecture.”
There was also a discussion of BPM and SOA approaches and roles, looking at the key roles for both BPM and SOA, and (once again) how the work of design and modelling is divided between the business analysts and the IT folks. A process-centric view of an organization tends to favour business analysts for most of the process modelling and design, although many BPMS vendor modelling tools have realistically only been usable by IT, which opens the door for the use of business-focussed modelling tools like ARIS. By involving the business side in the modelling and design of processes, business will start to understand the value of services and SOA — something that’s still a pretty hard sell in a lot of organizations outside the IT department.
With the new focus on collaboration and inline optimization, Gartner believes that processes will become less deterministic: less focussed on a predetermined “happy path”, and more goal-oriented. As new pathways and process maps emerge to meet those goals, they become input to the next round of process discovery.