Full bpmNEXT program here. The format is 30 minutes per speaker: 20 minutes of demo, 10 minutes of Q&A.
Day 2, second session.
Fully Exploiting the Potential of BPM in the Cloud, Carl Hillier, Kofax
A prime motivator for cloud is instant provisioning; demo showed the live provisioning of a Kofax TotalAgility cloud instance (based on Microsoft Azure). Instances must be provisioned by Kofax, not directly by the customer. Each customer gets their own SQL database and data storage, but the (stateless) web application and presentation layers are multi-tenant. After entry of the instance attributes, the instance was generated within 3 minutes and the TotalAgility designer was available for immediate use in the new instance for creating and executing process models. Identical functionality is provided on public cloud, private cloud and on premise. Software updates are applied automatically in the public cloud, but can be controlled by the customer in the private cloud and on premise environments.
The Decision Model, Michael Grohs, Knowledge Partners International
Business-friendly decision models can compress the months that it normally takes for IT to encode business rules into enterprise systems down to a few weeks; the goal is to eventually be able to directly author business policies and the underlying rules in a business-understandable and machine-readable form, allowing for near-instant deployment of new business rules. The Decision Model is a methodology and book, manifested in the DECISION product from Sapiens, for representing business logic as a separate component within an architecture. Any decisions that can be defined declaratively are extracted from the process model and stored in the decision model, which can then be referenced within the process model. The decision model notation is a goal-driven hierarchical representation of rules and rule families, along with the data that is acted upon by those rules. The elements in the decision model are linked to the implementation methods, forming the hand-off point between business and IT. The decision model connects the process model, rule models, use cases and business motivation models. Very brief demo of DECISION showing graphical representation of a decision model as well as the tabular structure of the rule families associated with the model. When creating a new model, import a text document of the policy wording, system can detect synonyms and other vocabulary analysis to identify inconsistencies in policies and assist with creation of the decision model.
BPM for the Internet of Things, Tom Debevoise and Troy Foster, Bosch
In the internet of things, there are potentially billions of devices out there generating data and requiring instructions. These are typically organized as massive distributed systems of systems, such as Smart Home or Smart Grid, to organize and control collections of devices. Localized rules can monitor collections of sensors/devices, and report up the chain to higher-level controllers when certain events occur, allowing information to be aggregated and actions to be taken, including launching BPM processes. Rules are present at the device level and at the higher collector level, as well as potentially within the BPM process. Demo of their monitor dashboard (from inubit acquisition) can show status of specific machines as well as aggregate statistics, e.g., how many machines are in a critical state requiring maintenance or replacement. Rules (from VisualRules acquisition) allow rules to be created for different machine types, e.g., to display an alert when a vibration sensor indicates that the machine requires preventive maintenance to avoid failure; this, in turn, could instantiate a BPM process to dispatch a field maintenance worker to the machine.
Break for lunch. One more session after lunch, then Best of Show voting and wrap-up.