Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was telling us at lunch. A big part of making this happen is splitting out monolithic systems into more agile components: orchestration engine, portal, rules engine and databases.
Considering the mostly business composition of the audience, he did a pretty deep technical dive into concepts such as dynamic recompilation, showing how the dynamic nature of lower level technical components help to create dynamic processes on the surface.
He went through a well-used diagram showing BPM adoption over the years and where SOA comes into the picture, and the inherent dynamism in models, which is the whole premise behind model-driven design. SOA is used to automate what machines do best, while BPM and the associated process models are used to empower what people do best. More automation actually means more capabilities for the human steps in the process.
He summarized the event capture-analysis-response chain (covered by Roy Schulte in a session this morning that I just couldn’t make myself write about): events triggering business processes, and also monitoring those processes, in order to provide better decision quality, faster response, reduce information overload and reduce cost.
Inevitably, we move on to Web 2.0 and the implications for collaborative, ad hoc and social processes, community evolution of a process, and adding presence and other types of social context to processes.
One of the keys to making processes dynamic is business rules management, since being able to change rules without changing the structure of the process gives us most of the agility that’s required in business while allowing those changes to be made by business users.
Nice to see that Daryl is thinking about rules in this context – excellent
JT
The OMG have an RFI just ended on Dynamic BPM. Presentations on this will be at the OMG meeting in 2 wks (including TIBCO’s).
Meeting = http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/orlando/info.htm
Agenda covering DBPM = http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/agendas/orlando/BMI.pdf
I agree that ad-hoc, evolving, collaborative process are important issue, not just because of Web 2.0, but also because of email overload and the rise of knowledge work. Most ad-hoc, evolving,collaborative processes are handled via email, and I don’t think they will migrate to a BPMS anytime soon.
Don’t get me wrong, I think rules are great and will be a valuable addition to BPMS toolkits, but I don’t think we can assume that this will solve the problem of ad-hoc, evolving, human intensive business processes now being managed through meetings, documents and emails. I think managing those types of processes will require something very different than what is available in a BPMS.
I have been blogging about this intermittently under the banner of "Human Process Management" or HPM (http://exeedtechnology.com/email-and-human-process-management)