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BPM2023 Utrecht Workshop on Business Process Optimization

11 years ago, Marlon Dumas from Tartu University chaired the BPM2012 conference in Tallinn, Estonia, which I was able to attend. We had met at a previous conference (maybe Milan?), then since that time I’ve worked with his company Apromore to create a white paper on process mining. Today, he gave a keynote at the workshop here at BPM2023 on the status and perspectives of business process optimization.

He started with the origins of process optimization from 20+ years ago: start with discovery to create the as-is model, then develop of the to-be model, testing of the new model, and eventually deployment. Adding simulation to the loop allows for some testing and predicted performance to feed back into the design prior to deployment. This type of process analysis had a lot of flaws due to some fundamentally flawed assumptions about the correctness of the process model and simulation parameters, the skills and behaviour of the process participants, and general resource management. Marlon (and many others) have endorsed these imperfect methods in the past, and he invited us to tear up his earlier book on BPM. 😆

Since then, he has been working on a better sort of simulation model based on discovery from event logs: think of it as using process mining as an automated generator for more complex simulation parameters rather than just the base process model. They have shared their work for other researchers to review and extend.

This has opened the door to more automated process optimization techniques: search-based, which adds domain knowledge to the simulation model discovery to generate a set of possible process changes that can then be simulated and tested to determine the best improvement opportunities. Optimization, as he pointed out, is a multi-dimensional problem since we are always working towards the improvement of more than one performance indicator. Dimensions of improvement may include optimization of decision rules, flow, tasks and/or resources. They’ve done some additional work on an optimization engine that’s also shared on GitHub.

He moved on to talking about conversational process optimization, which makes search-based optimization just a step in a broader approach that puts a human expert in the loop to guide the exploration of the optimization space. In this approach, a conversational UI has an interactive discussion with a human expert, then combines that with the search-based optimization techniques, then presents that back to the expert for review and further conversation and optimization.

As the presentation finished and we were moving to questions, security kicked us out of our room for overcrowding, so we adjourned to the outdoor square. Lots of great discussion, with Marlon mentioning that the field of Operations Research is okay except that it’s the domain of a bunch of mathematicians, and urging us to cast off the shackles of process models. Also a good bit about the optimization of resource workload and allocation to maximize efficiency: people work best when they are “happy” (a proxy for “unstressed and productive”), which means having neither too much nor too little work, and the right mix of work.

Marlon published his slide deck on Slideshare, which allowed me to steal a few screenshots rather than trying to photograph the live presentation.

BPM2023 Utrecht Workshop on BPM and Social Software

It’s been a minute! Last time that I attended the BPM academic research conference was in the “before times”, back in 2019 in Vienna. This week, I’m in Utrecht for this year’s version, and it’s lovely here – beautiful historic buildings and stroopwafels in the conference bag!

I’m starting with the workshop on BPM and social software. This was the first workshop that I attended at my first trip to the BPM conference in 2008 in Milan, also chaired by Rainer Schmidt.

All three of these presentations looked at different aspects of how traditional structured process modeling and orchestration fails at addressing end-to-end process management, and how social (including social media) constructs can help. In the first presentation, processes are too unstructured for (easy) automation; in the second, there’s a need for better ways to provide feedback from process participants to the design; and in the third, organizations can’t even figure out how to get started with BPM.

The first in the workshop was Joklan Imelda Camelia Goni, who was accompanied by her supervisor Amy van Looy, on “Towards a Measurement Instrument for Assessing Capabilities when Innovating Less-Structured Business Processes”. Some of the background research for this work was a Delphi study that I participated in during 2021-2022, so it was interesting to see how her research is advancing. There is a focus on capabilities within organizations: how capable are certain people or departments at determining the need for innovation and creating the innovation in (often manual) processes.

Next was Mehran Majidian Eidgahi on “Integrating Social Media and Business Process Management: Exploring the Role of AI Agents and the Benefits for Agility” (other paper contributors are Anne-Marie Barthe-Delanoë, Dominik Bork, Sina Namaki Araghi, Guillaume Mace-Ramete and Frédérick Bénaben). This looks at the problem of structured business process models that have been orchestrated/automated, but that need some degree of agility for process changes. He characterizes BPM agility at three stages: discovering, deciding and implementing, and sees that much of the work has focused on discovery (process mining) and implementing, but not as much on deciding (that is, analysis or design). Socializing BPM with the participants can bring their ideas and feedback into the process design, and they propose a social BPM platform for providing reactions, feedback and suggestions on processes. I’ve seen structures similar to this in some commercial BPM products, but one of the main issues is that the actual executing model is not how the participants envision it: it may be much more event-driven rather than a more traditional flow model. He presented some of their other research on bringing AI to the platform and framework, which provides a good overview of the different areas in which AI may be applied.

The last presentation in the workshop was by Sebastian Dunzer on “Design Principles for Using Business Process Management Systems” (other paper contributors Willi Tang, Nico Höchstädter, Sandra Zilker and Martin Matzner). He looks at the “pre-BPM” problem of how to have organizations understand how they could use BPM to improve their operations: in his words, “practice knows of BPM, but it remains unclear how to get started”. This resonates with me, since much of my consulting over the years has included some aspect of explaining that link between operational business problems and the available technologies. They did an issue-tracking project with a medium-sized company that allowed them to use practical applications and simultaneously provide research insights. Their research outcome was to generate design principles that link IT artifacts and users through functional relationships.

Many thanks to the conference chair, Hajo Reijers, for extending an invitation to me for the conference. I’ll be at more workshops later today, and the rest of the conference throughout the week.

Voices in Tech panel, on demand

Earlier this month, I was on a panel in honour of International Women’s Day, where a bunch of smart technical women discussed issues like how to build great implementation teams. If you want to watch the replay, you can see it here (registration required). The panel was hosted/sponsored by Camunda, in partnership with Infosys.

150 episodes of the Process Pioneers podcast

The Process Pioneers podcast recently published their 150th episode, which is a significant milestone considering that most podcasts wither into inactivity pretty quickly. It’s hosted by Daniel Rayner, managing director of APAC for GBTEC, so I suppose that technically they sponsor it, but it’s really just a free-ranging discussion that doesn’t talk about their products (or at least didn’t when I was on it).

You can see my interview with Daniel on the podcast from last year, it was a lot of fun and we delved into some interesting points.

21st International BPM Conference in Utrecht – opportunities to attend, present or sponsor

Way back in 2008, I took a chance and attended the international academic research conference on business process management in Milan. I was hooked, as you might have gathered from the 1000s of words that I blogged that week. Since then, I’ve attended a few more: Ulm, Germany in 2009; Hoboken, US in 2010; Clermont-Ferrand, France in 2011 (where I had the honour of delivering a keynote); Tallinn, Estonia in 2012; and Vienna, Austria in 2019 (where I gave a talk at a workshop). They are always hosted by a university that has a BPM research program, and often the sessions are held in the university lecture rooms which gives it a more relaxed atmosphere than your usual industry conference.

I’m fascinated by the research topics, and one common theme of my blogging from these conferences is that software vendors need to send their product owners/developers here, both to hear about and present ideas on research in BPM and related fields. There’s so many good ideas and smart people, you can’t help but come away having learned something of value. Starting in 2010, the conference started to include an industry track to be more inclusive of people who were not in academia or research environments. At some point, they also started offering companies the opportunity to sponsor the conference: I believe that some vendors sponsored coffee breaks and meals, or had booths at parts of the event. A good way to raise their profile with the attendees, which include not only academics but a lot of people from industry as well. And, as I’ve pointed out, it’s a great place for companies to meet promising young researchers who might be looking for a job in the future.

This year, the conference is in Utrecht, The Netherlands, on September 11-15, 2023. I’m hoping to attend after three years of hiatus due to that pesky little virus; I did attend some of the sessions virtually in the past couple of years but it’s just not the same as being there. If you want to submit a paper or give a presentation, you can see the important dates here – note that the abstracts for research papers are due next week, with other deadlines coming up shortly. If you just want to attend, they have an early bird registration price until July 18. If your company wants to sponsor the event in any way, there’s some information here along with contact information.

I’m really looking forward to getting back to this, and to other conferences this year, after dipping my toe back in the in-person conference pool with speaking slots last September (Hyland CommunityLIVE) and October (CamundaCon). I’ll also still be participating in virtual conferences, which allows me to attend more than I would normally have time or budget for, including speaking on a Voices in Tech panel next week. There is no question that the way we attend conferences has changed in the past three years. Some conferences are staying completely virtual, some are making a hard shift back to in-person only, while some are going the hybrid route. Meanwhile, companies that slashed their conference budget for attendees and sponsorships are reconsidering their spending in the light of increased attendance at in-person conferences. It’s going to take another year or two to see whether people will flock back to in-person conferences, or prefer to stick with the virtual style.

Voices in Tech panel

Edit with correction to above graphic: the panel is at 10am Eastern which is 3pm Central European time because we’re in that hellish period where North American clocks have moved forward but European ones haven’t.

I posted earlier this week on Mastodon that I’ve been taking a bit of a break but now getting back to things, and one of events that’s on my upcoming agenda is presenting on a panel Voices in Tech: Building Effective Automation Teams, hosted by Camunda and also sponsored by Infosys. This will take place online on March 15th, but you can head over to the link now and sign up. I will have the pleasure of reconnecting with co-panelists Uzma Khan of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, who I have known for many years, and Smriti Gupta of Infosys, who I shared the stage with at CamundaCon in Berlin last October. We will be joined by Ola Inozemtceva, a senior product marketing manager at Camunda, and the moderator will be Lana Ginns, product marketing manager at Camunda.

This is the 2023 version of the International Women’s Day panel that Camunda has been organizing for a few years now, and I really like that the focus is not on the fact that all of the panelists are women, but that we are “brilliant trailblazers in the tech world, who inspire people every day to redefine technology and how it can transform the world”. We’ll be discussing challenges and best practices with building high-performing orchestration teams, which ties in nicely with the series of video blogs that I’ve been doing lately for Trisotech on best practices in business automation.

I hope to see you there (virtually).

Flowable’s FlowFest 2022

Flowable is holding their half-day online FlowFest today, and in spite of the eye-wateringly early start here in North America, I’ve tuned in to watch some of the sessions. All of these will be available on demand after the conference, so you can watch the sessions even if you miss them live.

There are three tracks — technical, architecture and business — and I started the day in the tech stream watching co-founder Tijs Rademakers‘ presentation on what’s new in Flowable. He spent quite a bit of the hour on a technical backgrounder, but did cover some of the new features: deprecation of Angular, new React Flow replacing the Oryx modelers, a new form editor, improved deployment options and cloud support, a managed service solution, and a quick-start migration path that includes an automatic migration of Camunda 7 process instance database to Flowable (for those companies that don’t want to make the jump to Camunda 8 and are concerned about the long-term future of V7).

For the second session, I switched over to the architect stream for Roman Saratz’ presentation on low-code integration with data objects. He showed some cool stuff where changes to the data in an external data object would update a case, in the example tied to a Microsoft Dynamics instance. The presentation was relatively short and there was an extended Q&A, obviously a lot of people interested in this form of integration. At the end, I checked in on the business track and realized that the sessions there were not time-aligned with the two technical tracks: they were already well into the Bosch session that was third on the agenda – not sure why the organizers thought that people couldn’t be interested in technology AND business.

In the third session, I went back to the tech stream and attended Joram Barrez‘ presentation on scripting. Like a few of the other Flowable team, Joram came from Alfresco’s Activiti core development team (and jBPM before that), and is now Principal Software Architect. He looked at the historical difference between programs and scripts, which is that programs are compiled and scripts are interpreted, and the current place of pre-compiled [Java] delegates in service tasks versus script tasks that are interpreted at runtime. In short, the creation, compilation and deployment of Java delegates are definitely the responsibility of technical developers, while scripts can be created and maintained by less-technical low code developers. Flowable now allows for the creation a “service registry” task that is actually a Javascript or Groovy script rather than a REST call, which allows scripts to be reusable across models as if they were external service tasks rather than embedded within one specific process or case model. There are, of course, tradeoffs. Pre-compiled delegates typically have higher performance, and provide more of a structured development experience such as unit testing, and backwards-compatible API agreements. Scripts open up more development capability to the model developer who may not be Java-savvy. Flowable has created some API constructs that make scripts more capable and less brittle, including REST service request/response processing and BPMN error handling. It appears that they are shifting the threshold for what’s being done by a low code developer directly in their modeling environment, versus what requires a more technical Java developer, an external IDE and a more complex deployment path: making scripts first-class citizens in Flowable applications. In fat, Joram talked about ideas (not yet in the product) such as having a more robust scripting IDE embedded directly in their product. I am reminded of companies like Trisotech that are using FEEL as their scripting language in BPMN-CMMN-DMN applications, on the assumption that if you’re already using FEEL in DMN then using it throughout your application is a good idea; I asked if Flowable is considering this, and Joram said that it’s not currently supported but it would not be that difficult to add if there was demand for it.

To wrap up the conference, I attend Paul Holmes-Higgin‘s architecture talk on Flowable future plans. Paul is co-founder of Flowable and Chief Product Officer. He started with a discussion of what they’re doing in Flowable Design, which is the modeling and design environment. Tijs spoke about some of this earlier, but Paul dug into more detail of what they’ve done in the completely rebuilt Design tool that will be released in early 2023. Both the technical underpinnings and the visuals have changed, to update to newer technology and to support a broader range of developer types from pro code to low code. He also spoke about longer term (2-3 year) innovation plans, starting with a statement of the reality that end-to-end processes don’t all happen within a centralized monolithic orchestrated system. Instead, they are made up of what he refers to as “process chains”, which is more of a choreography of different systems, services and organizations. He used a great example of a vehicle insurance claim that uses multiple technology platforms and crosses several organizational boundaries: Flowable Work may only handle a portion of those, with micro-engines on mobile devices and serverless cloud services for some capabilities. They’re working on Flowable Jet, a pared-down BPMN-CMMN-DMN micro-engine for edge automation that will run natively on mobile, desktop or cloud. This would change the previous insurance use case to put Flowable Jet on the mobile and cloud platforms to integrate directly with Flowable Work inside organizations. With the new desktop RPA capabilities in Windows 11, Flowable Jet could also integrate with that as a bridge to Flowable Work. This is pretty significant, since currently end-to-end automation has a lot of variability around the edges; allowing for their own tooling in the edge as well as central automation could provide better visibility and security throughout.

Tijs, Jorram and Paul are all open source advocates in spite of Flowable’s current more prominent commercial side; I’m hoping to see them shifting some of their online conversations over to the Fosstodon (or some other Mastodon instance), where I have started posting.

That’s it for FlowFest: a good set of informational sessions, and some that I missed due to multiple concurrent tracks that I’ll go back and watch later.

Will the elephant replace the bird?

tldr; I’m on Mastodon at fosstodon.org/@skemsley

I’ve been on Twitter since March 2007 and have amassed over 7,500 followers (probably half of them bots, but whatever). There’s a current push to move off Twitter and onto Mastodon, an open source microblogging social network, because of the declining standards of content and new ownership over at the bird site. Can we successfully make the shift from tweeting to tooting?

In the old days of Twitter, which don’t seem that long ago, I used to engage in a lot of conversations: my timeline was mostly tweets from my friends and business colleagues, and we would banter back and forth. These days, however, I use Twitter mostly as a broadcast platform, where I post links to new blog posts, videos and other publications. I respond if someone mentions me directly, but it’s no longer the place that I go to start a conversation. It’s just too noisy, full of promoted tweets, and retweets about topics that I don’t care about by people who I barely know. To be fair, some of that is my fault: I tended to follow most people who followed me and had some sort of similar interests, and it’s a lot of work to go back and pare down that list of 2,000 who I follow to a more reasonable number. When lists came out, I started putting people on lists rather than following them directly, but it was probably already too late. Same, by the way, for LinkedIn: I was indiscriminate about who I added to my network, and it’s just too noisy over there for a real conversation.

Enter the elephant. Mastodon is an open source, decentralized social platform that has functionality quite similiar to Twitter: posts are “toots” instead of tweets; you can like, share and reply to posts, and can see a running feed of posts. The big difference is that Mastodon isn’t one company, or one instance: anyone can create a Mastodon instance, either privately for use within a smaller group, or included in a group of federated servers that share posts and (to some extent) account information. When you sign up, you need to choose the server where you want your account, although you can follow accounts from other servers. If you want to change servers at some point in the future, you can; however, it doesn’t appear that you can move your posts to the new server (although you will move your following/follower lists), so there is less incentive to do this once you start posting a lot.

I looked at the available servers that follow the Mastodon Server Covenant and are part of the fediverse (the group of federated servers), and picked fosstodon.org, which is a technology-focused server that includes a lot of (but is not exclusive to) free and open source software. I’m not exclusive to open source, but I do cover a number of process automation vendors with open source offerings and this felt like a good fit. You can find and follow me there at fosstodon.org/@skemsley. Will I be better at curating my follows on this platform, which I so miserably failed at on Twitter and LinkedIn? I have way less FOMO these days, so maybe.

I’m already starting to have some conversations over there, but finding it difficult to find who from my current circle of friends and colleagues is on Mastodon, and on which server — searching by name really only gives you who is on your server unless someone else on your server mentions them. I also have a lot to learn about curating my feed, since the defaults are Home (my posts, re-toots of my posts, and my followers’ posts), Local (all posts from everyone on my server) and Federated (holy crap, everything in the fediverse). I’ve discovered an unoffial but quite good source of helpful into at fedi.tips and will be reviewing more of that.

On a side note, Twitter tends to be a good platform for contacting customer service for some organizations, so I’m not going to abandon it outright, and I’ll still use it for broadcasts. Just covering my bases.

State of Process Orchestration panel replay

I was at CamundaCon in Berlin last month, and was on a panel about the state of process orchestration. Check it out.

Lots of interesting discussion, and it was fun to hear other perspectives from a large SI (Infosys) and a customer (PershingX) on the panel with me. Thanks to Camunda for the invitation, and my first European trip in almost three years!