Prof. Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer keynote: BPM 3.0 #BPM2009

Yesterday was a great day of workshops here at BPM2009 in Ulm, Germany, and today is the start of the conference proper. After some introduction, we heard from Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer of IDS Scheer (recently acquired by Software AG); I’ve heard Dr. Scheer speak at ARIS ProcessWorld in 2007 and 2008, and I was curious to see how his presentation to an academic audience would differ from the more commercial/enterprise audience of the user conferences. First big difference: no saxophone. 🙁

His topic was “BPM 3.0”, that is, a look at the future of BPM. He started with a historical view: how BPM has evolved over the past 25 years, and how the organizational scope of BPM has expanded from project-based implementations to blanketing the enterprise. BPM today has enormous strategic importance: you can’t do any sort of complex risk analysis without considering processes, and governance is based in a large part on appropriate process management.

Looking forward, we need to consider empowering the user by, for example, giving them ways to mash up their own view of processes by combining multiple data sources into a dashboard that is specific to their needs, or customizing how they search for information within processes. We also need to leverage the power of the community: he used the examples of IDS Scheer’s social media, including their community site and YouTube channel, although there are obviously more direct social applications within process design and execution.

There was a bit too much emphasis on the ARIS products: he illustrated each point with ARIS, which is fair, but went into a great deal of detail about how it works and the customers using it, which felt like a bit of a sales pitch.

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