Jim SinurCloud is a compelling and high performance multi-tenant environment that promises to be an aggregator and delivery system for business processes, business services and business content in an environment that should foster innovation. There are claims that cloud-enabled BPM will be come the business operating platform for many organizations. This is certainly a topic debate, so let’s start the debate. .
![MPj04389830000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/05/windowslivewriterdoesbpminthecloudbecomeabusinessoperatin-51b0mpj043898300001-2.jpg)
Pro:
The cloud is an ideal environment to build an inventory of business services for organizations and/or value/supply chains. BPM is the logical orchestration enabler of these business services to create situational process and applications.Cloud is the kind of environment designed for rapid innovation on demand. The BPM enabled cloud is a neutral platform for power users to deliver agile processes aimed at high scale personalization. This is necessary in an evolving world that demands processes and applications to specialize around clients and partners. The BPM enabled cloud allows organizations to innovate and deliver as you go because BPM supports process improvement in an integrated manner. Agile processes that are tapped into emerging events and contexts driven by organizational and community goals, is a powerful business platform. .
Con
While the above sounds very promising, there are some very real world problems that will have to be resolved. Even if security concerns can be addressed, there are some real concerns over governing this kind of slippery environment. The policy and decision management platforms are too new and evolving as we speak. Even if the aforementioned issues can be addressed and supported there will be a strong dependence on evolving multi-process and multi-enterprise collaborations. There are issues with master data management, mastery of complex events, process prediction/optimization plus the need for creating and managing unstructured processes. This kind of environment requires organizations and vendors to master goal driven processes. It will be difficult to test and validate this kind of agile and self evolving business platform. Few vendors can support the depth and breadth of the technology necessary to accomplish all of this. Who will underwrite this kind of environment: Amazon, Google IBM, Oracle, SAP or Microsoft? It is too early and it is too dangerous.
I believe It is a matter of time before this actually happens, but it will take an evolutionary set of paths that eventually converge. I’d like to hear what you have to say about this.
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules
9 responses so far ↓
1 Neeli Basanth May 14, 2009 at 1:42 am
Jim,
Yes governance will certainly be an issue to address in Cloud, but what i have been seeing in vendor offering currently is more “private” clouds which more or less similar to on-premise environment. So in this case, the governance and collaboration issues are same as they are in current solutions
Do you see this changing?
2 Jim Sinur May 14, 2009 at 5:47 am
Neeli,
Over time I can see this changing; starting with value/supply chains. It is a bit early right now. Google now has the infrastructure to host this kind of activity. I will be watching with a keen eye.
Jim
3 Alexander Samarin May 14, 2009 at 2:28 pm
I think this is a wrong sequence. At first, BPM should become a business operating platform than this platform can enjoy advantages of the cloud computing.
To achieve the first, it is necessary to have a commonly agreed BPM reference model (e.g. see http://www.slideshare.net/samarin/bpm-concepts-de-base-presentation) and a few reference architectures. Moving to the cloud may follow the way described in http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2009/04/bpm-in-action-calling-for-input-on-bpm.html .
Hope that bpmnexus.ning.com will advance with the BPM reference model soon.
Thanks,
AS
4 Jim Sinur May 14, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Alexander,
You may be right, but I think cloud opens a resilinet BPM environment to those who may not go after BPM ordinarily
Jim
5 Theo Priestley May 18, 2009 at 6:38 am
I think before we even attempt at Cloud we should look at expanding the collaborative nature that BPM offers. SoftwareAG and their AlignSpace product certainly has this going in the right direction.
Cloud has its potential but without an agreed foundation the winds of change will blow it away soon enough. SaaS, PaaS, Cloud BPM, Mobile BPM, it’s all jumping on bandwagons and following acronyms without fully understanding the infrastructure and governance implications.
Let’s concentrate on getting one thing right at a time rather than following the Lemmings.
6 Jim Sinur May 18, 2009 at 9:24 am
Theo,
Interesting viewpoint, but I have clients using cloud on bot the process deign and execution fronts. I wish we could take one thing at a time
Jim
7 Bernard Debauche June 5, 2009 at 6:20 pm
In Europe, many civil servants will retire in the coming years, and governments will tend to not replace them. Instead, they’ll increase the productivity of the public services. One of the European countries has put in place a large initiative addressing the problem with a whole and global approach. It has created a new training path to create new government professionals specialized in process management and the process transformation of government agencies. It has put in place a “BPM platform as a Service,” giving national and local administration the ability to model, design, execute and operate business processes.
For example, a local administration wishing to transform its “elder people care service” can look into the library of available models, see if another administration has gone through the same experience, take the model as a template, specialize it to local specificities, and then share it again with the public community. The approach is global in the sense that it takes into account all dimensions of the initiative, including politics.
In fact, I think I participated in a Cloud BPM project—before it was called Cloud computing! It started with a pilot county, with three first business processes (I remember the first one was around home garbage collection management and optimization!) and expanded as results were proven—more than 20% productivity. Isn’t this BPM in the Cloud?
Bernard Debauche
VP EMEA Marketing
Axway
8 Charles Rignall June 9, 2009 at 1:21 am
A couple of quick statements or hypothesees & then a deduction if I may:
1) What & How we conduct business today is not the same as 20-10 or even 5 years ago.
2) IBM – & other major Computer vendors – originally started selling applications that ran on their Operating Systems (OS) & computers as a way to sell their computers. Then developed ‘partners’ who wrote aps to run under their OS & all this evolved as the cost & time to develop apps became the hindrance to advancement & meeting customer demands.
3) We’ve evolved from siloed apps to collaborative communites of processes – encompassing the complete supply chain.
4) Policy & decision making needs to evolve to Governance – in order that evolution can be achieved in the time frame business demands. i.e. A more efficient set of ‘operational controls’ (Suggestion: embrace/incorporate ISO 38500).
I see Cloud computing as the evolutionary step to reduce cost & time to market in delivering Business Processes – i.e. when, what & how I need things get done in a way that is affordable for the consumer market. The Management – and therefore improvement part of ‘BPM’ – is what will benefit most from collaborative, Cloud computing.
9 Edward Hughes August 17, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Interesting points all around. Another dimension to BPM and cloud computing is that BPM provides the enablement tool kit that allows Cloud computing to deliver on the promise of component re-use. The Cloud, on its own, is merely a hosting solution with a low cost of entry. Empowered with BPM, it becomes an intelligent platform for hosting application components, rules and business processes for use across the enterprise. The ROI for delivering business applications instantaneously, on demand, that encapsulate best practices is much greater than the cost of hardware.