Yesterday, I attended the analyst sessions (which were mostly Q&A with Matt Quinn on the topics that he covered in the keynote), then was on the “Clash of the BPM Titans” panel, so not a lot of writing. No keynotes today, on this last day of TIBCO NOW 2014, but some BPM breakouts on the calendar — stay tuned.
I started the day with Jeremy Smith and Nam Ton That presenting on case management. They discussed customer journeys, and how their Fast Data platform allows you to detect and respond to that journey: this often includes semi-structured, dynamic processes that need to change based on external events and the process to date. It’s more than just process, of course; there needs to be context, actionable analytics, internal and external collaboration, and recommended actions, all working adaptively towards the customer-centric goal.
TIBCO addresses case management with additions to AMX BPM, not with a separate product; I believe that this is the best way to go for a lot of case management use cases that might need to combine more traditional structured processes with adaptive cases. The new capabilities added to support case management are:
- Case data, providing context for performing actions. The case data model is created independently of a process model; the modeling uses UML to create relational-style ERDs, but also scripting and other functions beyond simple data modeling. This appears to be where the power — and the complexity — of the case management capabilities lie.
- Case folders, integrating a variety of document sources, including from multiple ECM systems using CMIS, to act as the repository for case-related artifacts.
- Case state and actions, allowing a user (or agent) to view and set the state of a case — e.g., received, in process, closed — and take any one of a number of actions allowed for the case when it is that state. This is modeled graphical with a state/action model, which also can apply user/role permissions, in a very similar fashion to their existing page flows capability. Actions can include social interactions, such as requesting information from an expert, accessing a Nimbus-based operations manual related to the current action, applying/viewing analytics to provide context for the action at that state, or providing recommendations such as next best action. Rules can be integrated through pre-conditions that prevent, require or invoke actions.
- Ad hoc tasks, allowing the case user to instantiate a user task or subprocess; it appears they are doing this by pre-defining these in the process model (as ad hoc, or disconnected, tasks) so although they can be invoked on an ad hoc basis, they can’t be created from scratch by the user during execution. Given that multiple process models can be invoked from a case, there is still a lot of flexibility here.
- Case UI, providing some out of the box user interfaces, but also providing a framework for building custom UIs or embedding these capabilities within another UI or portal.
Related cases can be linked via an association field created in the case data model; since this is, at heart, an integration application development environment, you can do pretty much anything although it looks like some of it might result in a fairly complex and technical case data model.
They didn’t do an actual demo during the presentation, I’ll drop by the showcase later and take a peek at it later today.