Jim Sinur

In the last few weeks we have completed a successful BPM conference and a rousing Fall Symposium/IT Expo. While BPM is not yet scorching the earth yet, there are some hot trends and questions I have been sensing by listening to my clients and team mates. I would like to give you a quick run through the sizzling trends first. Questions to follow in another posting

A Better Work Experience:

While BPM has proven itself easy to use on the modeling and measurement sides, but there is an increased demand for logical workbenches that are designed by work role with personal customizations. This work experience goes beyond the typical portal experience, but extends that experience to include skills, workload, resource availability and cross process work status in various formats (visual, text, worklists, score card etc.)

Unstructured Processes:

BPM is moving to more aggressively support knowledge workers whose work tends not to be predictive in nature. There is a need to include more collaborative behaviors in process management that will likely leverage social design and processes that can’t be easily modeled. While there may be snippets of modeled process in the end to end process, the overall process will tend to be indeterminate for the knowledge worker.

Discovering Better Practices:

The agility found in BPM is a natural for delivering better practices in its journey to best practices (even if BPM is surrounding a back plane of best practice application services/components). This capability becomes essential in discovering the better behavior of knowledge workers as they drive to desired outcomes in a collaborative fashion.

Pattern Seeking/Sensing Tied to Near Real Time Agility:

The agility usually built into BPM execution technology begs for better management and use. One such method is business rules management that can link scenarios to policies to logical and physical business rules, limitations and tolerances. The other is tying process executions to pattern seeking methods and technologies to keep processes sharply tuned to the context it is running in at any given moment.

Inclusion of Optimization in Seek, Model and Adapt behaviors:

Business Pattern Strategies (BPS) needs to leverage various optimization algorithms in seeking opportunities for decisions to adjust resources including processes. Predictive analysis is an example of one of these algorithms that play well in the seek cycle. Modeling and adapt alternatives also use optimization capabilities such as inline simulation> Interest is growing in how to apply the right optimization technique at the right time.