process – Page 18

A variety of opinions on what’s ahead for BPM in 2018

I was asked to contribute to 2018 prediction posts on a couple of different sites, along with various other industry pundits. Here’s a summary.

BPM.com: Predictions

BPM.com published The Year Ahead for BPM – 2018 Predictions from Top Influencers, introduced by BPM.com’s Nathaniel Palmer and featuring mostly people who work for vendors but mostly whose opinions I respect. Many of the vendors’ predictions align with their product direction, either through good planning or happy coincidence. Winking smile

A few ideas that stood out:

Blockchain may be almost ready for its close-up. Miguel Valdés Faura (Bonitasoft) and Setrag Khoshafian (Pega) both mentioned the potential for integrating blockchain with processes using DPA (digital process automation) platforms. I’ve been watching this space for a couple of years, waiting for the connections to be made between BPM and blockchain, and in addition to these mentions in the predictions article, Bernd Ruecker (Camunda) published a post yesterday with a practical use case and MWD Advisors published a report on IBM Blockchain Platform that mentions its integration with IBM BPM.

Automated decisioning, whether DMN-based or AI/ML, is going to improve process automation significantly but there’s still a lot of trepidation. Denis Gagné (Trisotech) said that decision auditability – a legal requirement in some countries – could favor DMN-based decision services over AI/ML, while Roger King (TIBCO) sees AI-based automation as the key to having RPA replace workers. Keith Swenson (Fujitsu) predicts that deep learning will be both the most important and most disappointing innovation in 2018, while Peter Fingar is bullish on intelligent (AI) agents integrated with BPM. James Taylor (Decision Management Solutions) seemed a bit disheartened that DM is being trivialized as a “feature” of BPM rather than an independent stateless service where it can have the greatest impact.

Microservices architectures are replacing monolithic BPM systems. Brian Reale (ProcessMaker) predicts that microservices will disrupt the BPM market this year, and Roger King gave a nod to dynamically-orchestrated process fragments although didn’t explicitly mention microservices. I’m seeing microservices approaches from a few of the BPM vendors, and I agree that this has a lot of potential to shift away from the monolithic (and proprietary) platforms; watch for an article that I wrote for Alfresco on BPM and microservices to be published shortly on their blog.

Low code is allowing business users (analysts, really) to participate in DevOps directly. Malcolm Ross (Appian) sees low code as a catalyst for developer diversity and the blurring of lines between business and IT. Phil Simpson (Red Hat) states that low code and citizen developers are the only way to meet the need for constantly-changing applications. My concern is that, much like how business analysts were going to develop their own BPM applications when model-driven development came around several years ago, this isn’t actually going to happen in such an optimistic fashion.

Customer journey matters. Gero Decker(Signavio) is seeing top-level value chains being replaced by customer journey maps. To me, customer journey mapping feels like a bit of old wine in new bottles, 10 years after outside-in process modeling and other customer-centric views, but whatever it takes to get some traction around modeling process to include the customer and optimize from their point of view. I’m speaking on this topic at next week’s OPEX Week conference.

BPM is no longer BPM. The term is being replaced by digital process automation, digital transformation and a number of others as the platforms expand beyond just process modeling and execution. Neil Ward-Dutton (MWD Advisors) envisions different types of tools vying for the place that BPM platforms occupy now within organizations, from RPA to model-driven application development tools. As I wrote in my section the article, “BPM is dead…long live BPM!”

Lots of great insights in there, check out the entire article on BPM.com.

BPMtips.com: Skills

Zbigniew Misiak on BPM tips takes a slightly different predictions approach, asking what BPM-related skills and techniques will be most in demand in 2018, where to learn those skills, and what’s no longer relevant in BPM Skills in 2018 – Hot or Not.

Unlike the BPM.com list, which was dominated by vendors, this one has mostly opinions from consultants with some practitioners thrown in. There’s a lot of generic “people need to keep up on the latest technology trends” (duh), but some specific advice stood out:

Process/business architecture to connect processes to value. This ties in with the customer journey mapping trends that we saw in the BPM.com article; here, Roger Burlton (Process Renewal/BPTrends) stresses the importance of including the customer and other external stakeholders in the processes and value definition, and Sandeep Johal (PPB Advisory) reminds us that the focus of process management is (or should be) on improving customer experience via a variety of technologies. Ian Gotts (Q9 Elements) identifies business analysis and critical questioning as key skills, linking to broader business requirements such as GDPR, and Jim Sinur (Aragon) lists journey mapping.

BPMN, CMMN and DMN for standardized modeling. Alan Fish (FICO) sees formal modeling of processes and decisions as important, and Juergen Pitschke (Process Renewal) believes both BPMN and DMN are important, but some say that this is no longer required in low code process application development tools. BJ Biernatowski (Nordstrom) wonders if BPMN has a future, Roger Burlton thinks that process analysts only need to know how to use the core elements, and Sandeep Johal advocates getting rid of manual current-state modeling as automated process discovery, analysis and improvement takes over.

RPA bot training. Abhijit Kakhandiki (Automation Anywhere) suggests this somewhat depressing skill – train the robot to do your job! – but I agree that learning this would help a lot of people create helper functions for their tasks or even completely automate some tasks. Much in the same way that we used to create Excel macros… On a similar note, I recommended that people gathering requirements become proficient with the low code BPM platforms to at least create prototypes, if not the full applications, and Phil Simpson (Red Hat) recommends that less-technical BPM practitioners start to gain an understanding of things that are likely to significantly impact how applications are designed and deployed, such as RPA and microservices.

Interpersonal and soft skills in BPM and change management, in addition to technical skills. Adrian Reed (Blackmetric) listed influencing, stakeholder engagement and conflict resolution as important to making sure that the technology part of the projects fit into the business and people. I discussed some similar skills: the ability to translate need into action, and the need for developers to learn more about what the business does.

Again, lots more to read here, check out the original on BPMtips.com.

Prepping for OPEXWeek presentation on customer journey mapping – share your ideas!

I’m headed off to OPEX Week in Orlando later this month, where I’ll give a presentation on customer journey mapping and how it results in process improvement as well as customer satisfaction/value. Although customer journey mapping is commonly used to talk about user experience/navigation on customer-facing websites, I want to look at the bigger picture of what we used to call “outside-in processes”, where internal processes are turned on their head to show the process from the customer’s point of view. Once you start thinking about what the customer is trying to accomplish, it can completely change how you perform and set priorities on the internal work, as well as changing the user experience presented to the customer.

I’m preparing a few slides to guide the presentation, and if you have any good stories to share, feel free to let me know by commenting on this post or tweeting to me.

I’m also sitting on a panel the following day on low code and BPM, which I’ve recently written a paper on (sponsored by TIBCO).

ITESOFT | W4 Secure Capture and Process Automation digital business platform

It’s been three years since I looked at ITESOFT | W4’s BPMN+ product, which was prior to W4’s acquisition by ITESOFT. At that time, I had just seen W4 for the first time at bpmNEXT 2014, and had this to say about it:

For the last demo of this session, Jean-Loup Comeliau of W4 on their BPMN+ product, which provides model-driven development using BPMN 2, UML 2, CMIS and other standards to generate web-based process applications without generating code: the engine interprets and executes the models directly. The BPMN modeling is pretty standard compared to other process modeling tools, but they also allow UML modeling of the data objects within the process model; I see this in more complete stack tools such as TIBCO’s, but this is less common from the smaller BPM vendors. Resources can be assigned to user tasks using various rules, and user interface forms are generated based on the activities and data models, and can be modified if required. The entire application is deployed as a web application. The data-centricity is key, since if the models change, the interface and application will automatically update to match. There is definitely a strong message here on the role of standards, and how we need more than just BPMN if we’re going to have fully model-driven application development.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Laurent Hénault and François Bonnet (the latter whom I met when he demoed at bpmNEXT in 2015 and 2016) about what’s happened in their product since then. From their company beginnings over 30 years ago in document capture and workflow, they have expanded their platform capabilities and relabelled it as digital process automation since it goes beyond BPM technology, a trend I’m seeing with many other BPM vendors. It’s not clear how many of their 650+ customers are using many of the capabilities of the new platform versus just their traditional imaging and workflow functions, but they seem to be expanding on the original capabilities rather than replacing them, which will make transitioning customers easier.

The new platform, Secure Capture and Process Automation (SCPA), provides capabilities for capture, business automation (process, content and decisions), analytics and collaborative modeling, and adds some nice extras in the area of document recognition, fraud detection and computer-aided process design. Using the three technology pillars of omni-channel capture, process automation, and document fraud detection, they offer several solutions including eContract for paperless customer purchase contracts, including automatic fraud detection on documents uploaded by the customer; and the cloud-based Streamline for Invoices for automated invoice processing.

Their eContract solution provides online forms with e-signature, document capture, creation of an eIDAS-compliant contract and other services required to complete a complex purchase contract bundled into a single digital case. The example shown was an online used car purchase with the car loan offered as part of the contract process: by bundling all components of the contract and the loan into a single online transaction, they were able to double the purchase close rate. Their document fraud detection comes into play here, using graphometric handwriting analysis and content verification to detect if a document uploaded by a potential customer has been falsified or modified. Many different types of documents can be analyzed for potential fraud based on content: government ID, tax forms, pay slips, bank information, and public utility invoices may contain information in multiple formats (e.g., plain text plus encoded barcode); other documents such as medical records often contain publicly-available information such as the practitioner’s registration ID. They have a paper available for more information on combatting incoming document fraud.

Their invoice processing solution also relies heavily on understanding certain types of documents: 650,000 different supplier invoice types are recognized, and they maintain a shared supplier database in their cloud capture environment to allow these formats to be added and modified for use by all of their invoice processing customers. There’s also a learning environment to capture new invoice types as they occur. Keep in mind that the heavy lifting in invoice processing is all around interpreting the vendor invoice: once you have that sorted out, the rest of the process of interacting with the A/P system is straightforward, and the payment of most invoices that relate to a purchase order can be fully automated. Streamline for Invoices won the Accounts Payable/Invoicing product of the year at the 2017 Document Manager Awards.

After a discussion of their solutions and some case studies, we dug into a more technical demo. A few highlights:

The Web Modeler provides a fully BPMN-compliant collaborative process modeling environment, with synchronous model changes and (persistent) discussion thread between users. This is a standalone business analyst tool, and the model must be exported as a BPMN file for import to the engine for execution, so there’s no round-tripping. A cool feature is the ability to scroll back through the history of changes to the model by dragging a timeline slider: each changed snapshot is shown with the specific author.
Once the business analyst’s process model has been imported into the BPMN+ Composer tool, the full application can be designed: data model, full process model, low code forms-based user experience, and custom code (if required). This allows a more complex BPMN model to be integrated into a low code application – something that isn’t allowed by many of the low code platforms that provide only simple linear flows – as well as developer code for “beyond the norm” integration such as external portals.
Supervisor dashboards provide human task monitoring, including task assignment rules and skills matrix that can be changed in real time, and performance statistics.

The applications developed with their tools generally fall into the case management category, although they are document/data based rather than CMMN. Like many BPM vendors, they are finding that there is not the same level of customer demand for CMMN as there was for BPMN, and data-driven case management paradigms are often more understandable to business people.

They’ve OEM’d some of the components (the capture OCR, which is from ABBYY, and the web modeler from another French company) but put them together into a seamless offering. The platform is built on a standard Java stack; some of the components can be scaled independently and containerized (using Microsoft Azure), allowing customers to choose which data should exist on which private and public cloud infrastructure.

They also showed some of the features that they demoed at the 2017 bpmNEXT (which I unfortunately missed): process guidance and correction that goes beyond just BPMN validation to attempt to add data elements, missing tasks, missing pathways and more; a GANTT-type timeline model of a process (which I’ve seen in BPLogix for years, but is sadly absent in many products) to show expected completion times and bottlenecks, and the same visualization directly in a live instance that auto-updates as tasks are completed within the instance. I’m not sure if these features are fully available in the commercial product, but they show some interesting views on providing automated assistance to process modeling.

What’s in a name? BPM and DPA

The term “business process management” (BPM) has always been a bit problematic because it means two things: the operations management practice of discovering, modeling and improving business processes, which may have no technology involved whatsoever; and the suite of technologies associated with automating processes. I’ve often heard – and sometimes participated in – arguments on the distinction between BPM-the-discipline and BPM-the-technology. Many people use “BPMS” (BPM system or suite) to define the technology while reserving “BPM” for the discipline, but that’s not sufficiently universal to avoid confusion.

To compound the confusion, the components of a BPMS have grown from completely process-focused modeling and execution to more complete application development suites that may include decision management, analytics, content management and much more. Gartner relabelled this market “iBPMS” starting around 2011 when they realized that BPM suites were doing much more than just BPM:

The intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) market is the natural evolution of the earlier BPMS market, adding more capabilities for greater intelligence within business processes. Capabilities such as validation (process simulation, including “what if”) and verification (logical compliance), optimization, and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. iBPMSs have added enhanced support for human collaboration such as integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management.

The term iBPMS makes it sound like what we were doing before wasn’t intelligent, which clearly is not the case, but it also made it obvious that we needed a different name to describe these technologies that we’re using to automate our business functions.

Since then, we’ve moved through a number of different names and acronyms in an attempt to describe these systems: for the more case-oriented (with little or no predefined processes), we have “case management” (confused with the non-technical term used in social sciences and healthcare) which is sometimes abbreviated as CM (confused with the abbreviation for content management, which is also abbreviated as ECM but has now be rebranded as content services) plus the variations of advanced or adaptive case management (ACM), and dynamic case management (DCM). Although there are differences between case management and BPM, there are also a lot of similarities and the distinction in products is sometimes a bit fuzzy. However, using the term “process” causes a certain amount of angst amongst the case managementerati.

This year, Forrester started using the term “digital process automation” (DPA), which is pretty much what Gartner is calling iBPMS. Forrester’s use of DPA seems to have been slightly preceded by the term “digital business automation”. Although “digital” and “automation” are a bit redundant in this context – we’re not going to do analog mechanical automation of most businesses – I think that the use of “business” rather than “process” is a much better fit. However, due to Forrester’s recent DPA wave report, vendors are leaping onto the DPA bandwagon, so we might be stuck there for a while.

From their report in February 2017, “Traditional BPM Gives Way To Digital Process Automation”, Forester describes why this shift is necessary without actually describing the differences between [i]BPM[S] and DPA; instead, this seems to be coming about because organizations took what should have been model-driven development (aka low-code) BPMS and used it in waterfall development environments, thereby turning what should have been agile into legacy. In other words, they seem to be hoping that changing the name of the class of tools will change how organizations use the tools. Call me a cynic, but I’m not completely hopeful about that.

I’m not arguing that the current low code, process/case-centric platforms that combine a full suite of business automation tools aren’t a step forward from yesterday’s BPM platforms in terms of enabling automation as a part of digital transformation. But what is going to change within customer organizations to prevent them from undermining the inherent rapid application development capabilities by enforcing antiquated software development lifecycle methods?

Bonus reading: check back on my review of a Gartner presentation from 2006 on the future of BPM, which looked forward as far as 2017! They were correct that the primary value of BPM moved from productivity to visibility to innovation, and I correctly predicted that their predictions would happen much faster than they expected.

Tune in for the 2017 WfMC Global Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow

I had the privilege this year of judging some of the entries for WfMC’s Global Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow, and next Tuesday the 12 winners will be announced in a webinar. Tune in to hear the results from Nathaniel Palmer and Keith Swenson, as well as a presentation on industry trends from Connie Moore of Digital Clarity Group.

Presenting at OPEXWeek in January: customer journey mapping and lowcode

I’ll be on stage for a couple of speaking slots at the OPEX Week Business Transformation Summit 2018 in Orlando the week of January 22nd:

Tuesday afternoon, I’ll lead a breakout session in the customer-centric transformation track on increasing customer satisfaction through customer journey mapping and process improvement.
Wednesday morning, I’ll be on a panel in the RPA track on how low-code platforms are transforming BPM.

I was last at OPEX Week in 2012, when it was still called PEX Week (for Process Excellence Network) – I was on a BPM blogger panel that time around – and it will be interesting to see how it’s changed since then. Looks like a lot more automation technology in the current version, with the expectation that digital transformation isn’t going to come about just by modeling your business.

If you’re going to be there, look me up at one of my sessions or around the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Release webinar: @CamundaBPM 7.8

I listened in on the Camunda 7.8 release webinar this morning – they issue product releases every six months like clockwork – to hear about the new features and upgrades from CEO Jakob Freund and VP of engineering Daniel Meyer.

They’re obviously getting a broader audience for these release webinars than just their current customers and open source community members, and started with a bit about the company, the product stack and their clients. We heard about a recent case study presented at their first San Francisco community day: 24 Hour Fitness is using Camunda process and decision management for high volume real-time orchestration of their core business processes. With over 190 processes in production, executing 20 million BPMN and 18 million DMN instances per day, this is clearly an enterprise-strength application; they are using the Camunda Enterprise Edition rather than the Community Edition for the additional features and SLA-based support, but the underlying engine and much of the tooling is identical between the products.

The key new features and updates are as follows:

Workflow engine performance improvements. A new batch mode allows 3-4 times more process instances to be executed per minute on several of the supported databases. This is based on grouping database transactions for the same database table (including both operational and audit tables), then doing a single round-trip call between the Camunda server and the database server to execute the batch of inserts, updates and deletes.
Cockpit batch operations. It’s now possible to do bulk operations for suspending/activating and modifying running processes instances, and restarting completed process instances. Process instances can be selected by process definition name and by more complex search and filtering operations such as instance variable values, then a batch command issued to suspend, restart, modify or delete instances. A new feature also allows all instances that are at a specific task to be dragged to a new task directly in the process model, whereas this was only possible with single instances before; this can be used either to move the instances to a new task to correct for an error condition or changed process flow, or to restart instances that are sitting at the final end node.
More Cockpit features. In addition to the batch operations, Cockpit also now has faster BPMN model rendering (from 8 seconds down to 2 seconds), ability to delete process definitions, and a number of other administrative functions.
Spring Boot Starter. Originally created as a community extension in 2015 (with significant contributions from community members Jan Galinski and Oliver Steinhauer), Camunda adopted this project into the main code base to create an officially-supported version of the Camunda Spring Boot Starter, documented here.

The first two updates are focused squarely on improving performance and administration for high volume operations, likely driven by clients such as 24 Hour Fitness, that will serve Camunda well as they push into more core enterprise business processes. The Spring Boot integration positions them well for deploying BPM services in a microservice architecture.

Good summary of the new features in 7.8, and a great Spring Boot coding demo by Meyer, in spite of his grumbling about having to do it on Windows for the webinar. Smile

The webinar will be available for replay soon; check their website for availability. You can also see their release blog post that links to the release notes and describes many of the things that I saw today in the webinar.

Disclaimer: Camunda has been, but is not currently, a client. They did not provide any incentive to attend and write about this webinar, and these are my own opinions. That’s always the case for what I write here, but it’s good to make it explicit every once in a while.

ABBYY partnerships in ECM, BPM, RPA and ERP

It’s the first session of the last morning of the ABBYY Technology Summit 2017, and the crowd is a bit sparse — a lot of people must have had fun at the evening event last night — and I’m in a presentation by another ex-FileNet colleague of mine, Carl Hillier.

He discussed how capture isn’t just a discrete operation any more, where you just capture, index and store in a content management repository, but is now the front end to business processes that have the potential for digital transformation. To that end, since ABBYY has no plans to expand their side of the business, they have made strategic partnerships with a number of vendors that push into downstream processes: M-Files and Laserfiche for content management, Appian and Pega (still in the works) for BPM, and Acumatica for ERP. As with many technology partnerships, there can be overlap in capabilities but that usually sorts out in favor of the specialist vendor: for example, with Laserfiche, ABBYY is being used to replace Laserfiche’s simpler OCR capabilities for customers with more complex capture capabilities. Both BPM vendors have RPA capabilities — Appian through a partnership with Blue Prism, Pega through their OpenSpan acquisition — and there’s a session following by RPA vendor UiPath on using ABBYY for RPA that likely has broader implications for working with these other partners.

For the solution builders who use ABBYY’s FlexiCapture, the connectors to these other products gives them fast path to implementation, although they can also use the ABBYY SDK directly to create solutions that include competing products. We saw a bit about each of the ABBYY connectors to the five strategic partners, and how they take advantage of those platforms’ capabilities: with Appian, for example, a capture operator uses FlexiCapture to scan/import and verify documents, then the connector maps the structured data directly into Appian’s data objects (records), whereas for one of the content management platforms, they may transfer a smaller subset of document indexing data. The Acumatica integration is a bit different, in that FlexiCapture isn’t seen as a separate application for the capture front end, but it’s embedded within the Acumatica interface as an invoice capture service.

ABBYY’s plan is to create more of these connectors, making it easier for their VARs and solution partners (who are the primary attendees at this conference) to quickly build solutions with ABBYY and a variety of platforms.

Citizen development with @FlowForma and @JohnRRymer

I attended a webinar today sponsored by FlowForma and featuring John Rymer of Forrester talking about low-code platforms and citizen developers. Rymer made a distinction between three classes of citizen developers, or rather, people who can benefit from rapid application development using low-code tools: line-of-business developers, business developers, and power users. I would argue that LOB developers are not really citizen developers even though they can benefit greatly from using low-code tools, since they are typically professional developers who use a variety of technical platforms: as Rymer later stated, there are low-code platforms for professional developers, and ones for business developers. I like Gartner’s definition of citizen developer instead, which highlights the non-professional developer aspect:

A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. In the past, end-user application development has typically been limited to single-user or workgroup solutions built with tools like Microsoft Excel and Access. However, today, end users can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications using shared services, fourth-generation language (4GL)-style development platforms and cloud computing services.

That being said, things are a bit murky still in the low-code market, and Rymer does well to distinguish between the two types of low-code platforms:

Those for professional developers who are looking for rapid application development platforms to speed their delivery cycle: although they could create the applications using traditional coding techniques, it just takes too long. Low-code BPM products in this segment, according to Rymer, include Appian, Bizagi and PNMSoft, and marry fast visual development with flexibility and deployment control.
Those for business developers and power users – what I consider to be the true citizen developers – who are not capable of developing applications using more technical tools, and possibly would end up a bit confused even with the low-code platforms that are targeted at professional developers. The business developer low-code platforms are visual tools but have less flexibility and many fewer options to provide a simpler “no-code” experience. In the BPM space, Rymer includes FlowForma, KiSSFLOW and Nintex in this category: these products also tend to self-identify as “workflow” rather than full BPM suites.

Regardless of the platform, the key is that all of these types of developers need to be moved off unmanaged tools such as Microsoft Excel, and onto low-code platforms where their work can be properly supported, managed and reused.

Neil Young, FlowForma’s CEO (no, not THAT Neil Young Winking smile ) took over to talk about how their product approaches the business developer/power user market, and some of their customer success stories. Their tool, based on Microsoft Office 365, combines forms, simple workflows, document generation and collaboration in a platform that allows people to get up to speed in day or two and start creating their own applications.

The discussion at the end had an interesting bit on the changing role of business analysts, who typically fall into the power user category from Rymer’s earlier categorization, although I see a lot of these who have transferred from IT groups are are really business developers. In the past, BAs work has been focused on creating written requirements, whereas low-code platforms allow them to create a working prototype as part of the requirements. There was a question from an attendee on how to identify citizen developers within your business: Rymer said to look for people who are now solving problems with spreadsheets or databases, who are probably operational managers. When I do a walkthrough at an enterprise client, I always look for the spreadsheets being used in the general workflow: these identify areas for process/system improvement, and also pinpoint the problem-solvers who are creating these tools and could easily become citizen developers.

If you’re interested in listening to a replay, FlowForma will likely have that up on their site within a day or so. Update: unfortunately, the original registration link disappeared from their site, and they don’t seem to have a replay video published..

Young gave me a full Flowforma product briefing several months ago, showing how forms and workflows are created, what their in-process collaboration looks like, and document generation. I’m not a Sharepoint or Office 365 expert, so not sure how much of this is native functionality versus their additions. At that time, and again in this webinar, he discussed the three categories of problems that they solve: everyday processes, “dark” processes, and collaborative decisions. There’s definitely an overlap with many of the low-code case management tools, in part due to the strong content management capabilities. I’ve attached my snaps from the briefing below; although they’re a few months out of date, they give an idea of the platform capabilities. You can sign up with them for a 30-day trial if you want to try it out.

International BPM conference 2018 headed down under

The international BPM conference for academics and researchers is headed back to Australia next year, September 9-14 in Sydney, hosted by the University of New South Wales. I’ve attended the conference a few times, and always come away at least a little bit smarter, and having met more great BPM enthusiasts. I was even invited to give a keynote one year, which was a great honour.

This year, the conference has a new program structure with three tracks:

Foundations
Engineering
Management

You can read more about the tracks here, particularly that each track invites papers based on different research methods. Although many of us who work in industry or as analysts don’t do the type of research that would allow participation in the Foundations or Engineering tracks, the Management track welcomes papers based on empirical observation. The call for papers for all tracks is open now until March.