PBS is about orienting scenarios and policies around the “seek, model and adapt” cycle. Gartner is putting a fair amount of wood behind the PBS arrow and it just makes sense that BPM will play strongly to support PBS. BPM supports the kind of agility necessary to adapt to shifting policies based on strategy changes when enabled by business rules management (BRMS). See our CEO, Gene Hall, below with our major themes at Symposium and notice PBS.
PBS & BPM Today:
The maturity of most organization’s, today is around continuous process improvement that is “eye ball” change driven. Process directors/managers watch the outcomes of processes and tweak the workloads and outcomes to match to the goals and policies that executive management have established.. The changes need to support the adapt portion of the PBS cycle in an optempo fashion are pretty much manual, but some BPM capabilities can model alternatives with inline simulation leveraging a “champion – challenger” method to see the impact of potential changes. This will suffice for now, but there is more to come.
PBS and BPM Tomorrow:
BPM, in the future, will be goal driven and will orient itself around goals; ergo reduce the amount of manual changes. In addition process will become more plugged into events both inside and outside the processes, so that processes will become more context aware. In addition, processes are becoming more collaborative, unstructured and plugged into the collective. We are seeing the beginning signs of each of these individually in many vendors forward looking plans. There are a few that will combine many features to support the above, starting in mid 2010. .
19 responses so far ↓
1 uberVU - social comments // Nov 19, 2009 at 10:12 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by JimSinur: What’s the frequency Kenneth? Have U picked up the patterns yet? http://bit.ly/1HiXPI #BPM…
2 Jacob McNulty // Nov 19, 2009 at 12:31 pm
This is an interesting concept and I look forward to learning more. Can you shed any more light as to the ‘beginning signs’ you’re seeing or do we have to wait until mid-2010 for those?
How will PBS work, compete or integrate with a methodology like Value Network Analysis (VNA) that provides a network-centric, systems view of a process?
3 Jim Sinur // Nov 20, 2009 at 9:06 am
Jacob,
There is a significant body of work out on Gartner.com and I will be writing a detailed research note for that same destination.
Jim
4 Jacob McNulty // Nov 21, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Great – thank you Jim – I look forward to reading your write-up.
Jacob
5 Dave Feineman // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:57 am
Jim-
Maybe too many leaps of faith for me in a short posting…
I would say that business modeling which makes abstract business processes visible and re-useable is a key enabler of business agility. Business modeling is an area of business processes which can deal with collaborative, knowledge supported processes in changing external strategic contexts that are key to value generation. In general, the appropriate end goal is not to build automated workflows and systems in that domain but to enhance global synergies and get more results from the same resource commitment.
Most BPMS have been created out of repackaging earlier workflow systems- and their goal is end to end automated running. I am not sure how many vendors truely grasp that there are valid reasons for process models that never get compiled into code.So iam not sure about your vision of tomorrow being as close as 2010.
Now the jumping off point for your posting was that pattern based strategies are improtant and relevant without actually saying much about them. If a pattern is merely a process fragment that allows us to solve a recurring problem- I can see how one might want to see patterns and BPMS link up. But the key question then becomes at what leveel of abstraction are strategic patterns actually useful and re-useable?
6 Jim Sinur // Nov 23, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Dave,
Thanks for commenting. The patterns I refer to are not the processing patterns per se, but business related patterns that drive the goals of flexible proceses, that may be made up of sub-process (snippets) put together in patterns (dynamic or static). I understand your point. Both can be considered patterns. I agree that executing models should be the target, but not necesary to take advantage of business and process patterns working together. Even with vendors that aren’t completely there yet, progess with patterns will commnece
.
JIm
7 Emma Grace // Nov 26, 2009 at 11:45 am
Jim, on top of the work the BPM vendors do/will do to leverage the PBS opportunity, do you think our business partners – the System Integrators and Consulting companies will also need to change? Maybe to develop new skills and best practices? How should they address this opportunity?
Thanks,
Emma
8 Jim Sinur // Nov 26, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Emma,
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Your point is the secret to making this work. Certainly a deep topic around changing habits. We are not used to a dynamic world in my generation, but the next may be better equipped. This is about changing peoples habits and thought processes
Jim
9 VJ // Nov 26, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Jim,
Would PBS concentrate on the pain points, would it be industry specific.. and goal oriented.. if so, then should I expect another markup language to evolve.
Your response on changing peoples habit gives an indication that PBS is just a concept. Did I get it right
VJ
10 Jim Sinur // Nov 26, 2009 at 7:53 pm
VJ,
PBS will not just focus on pain points, it will also identify opportunities as well. On a micro level, there will be industry patterns, but there will also be macro paterns as well. PBS is a mindset and discipline that will be supported by combinations of technolgies. The key seek, model and adapt cycle will need methods and tools. The evolution will be fun to watch, but there will be many starting points. Changing the way people think is crucial.
Jim
11 Monique Calisti // Nov 27, 2009 at 11:25 am
Jim
I agree with your assessment that \BPM, in the future, will be goal
driven…\ I’d like to add, however, that already today it *can* be goal
driven.
That’s why we at Whitestein Technologies decided to extend standard BPMN with goal-oriented modeling artifacts and concepts (GO-BPMN). Our process engine directly executes such models, interprets the goals and dynamically composes an optimized process path out of alternative action patterns while always factoring in the real-time business context and events. This is possible today.
I appreciate your thoughts and Gartner’s commitment to get more people aware of and thinking about this major ‘upgrade’ of what BPM(S) can do.
Cheers,
Monique
12 VJ // Nov 27, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Jim,
Let me think ahead of time, Assuming I’m into a new world of PBS, thousands of Patterns would have evolved by then, on one hand give me an oppurtunity to explore them.. but that alarms me, would I not require a powerful simulation tool to provide the benefit forecast/ atleast identify the anti patterns..
This would take me back to square one – I would be in search of a technology to support my judgement.
VJ
13 Jim Sinur // Nov 28, 2009 at 11:14 am
VJ,
There are two modes.
One is the proactive mode where one has a pattern that one is looking for based on opportunities and threats. Then the presence of the pattern or contributing events would trigger an alarm/notification for action.
The other is reactive with no plan where your scenario would be involved. I forsee leveraging a number of algorythms to serch, like BI except real time. Simulation, correlation, pattern matching, complexity algorythms, and predictive analysis could help. This is why it will require an evolution of people and effective technologies.
This is a journey.
Jim
14 Alberto Manuel // Nov 28, 2009 at 3:18 pm
There is a very interesting article on the subject in HBR. Spotting Patterns on the Fly from HBR November 2002 http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2002/11/spotting-patterns-on-the-fly-a-conversation-with-birders-david-sibley-and-julia-yoshida / ar / 1.
Either way there are already applications of this concept in business? Can you give examples?
15 Jim Sinur // Nov 28, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Alberto,
Thanks for the article. We have been gathering a number of examples. One manual example is a financial organization that has dedicated a group of analysts that ar looking for patterns that may affect this organization. Automation assists are the focus as they take on more pattern seeking.
Jim
16 Alberto Manuel // Nov 29, 2009 at 5:48 am
Jim: I was discussing this with some colleagues and it occurred to us that the shared services center of our company there is a financial group that has a habit of cross information on worldwide economic performance and the markets where we sell products – in this case bathtubs . This group make predictions and often makes recommendations, some of them are translated into financial rules. Two years ago, they told reduce working capital and watch it very closely.
What we know is that this work is executed manually by merging data. The internal data comes from our systems, external data, is obtained analysing reports of the European Central Bank.
If I understand what you are proposing is the automation of the analytical function, so much more advanced than, say, what wallmart is doing today detecting changes in consumption patterns and thus prevent losses in business. That will be much more predictive, something which the principle applies in predictive maintenance of industrial equipment or in electricity transmission lines. I would be glad you can tell something more about it you when something is ready, because I think this issue is of vital importance for strategic management and it’s impact in business processes.
17 Russ Blaesing | SharePoint Workflow | SPS Workflow // Dec 10, 2009 at 5:48 pm
PBS sounds like a great way forward, and BPM has to play an essential role in implementing it. I’ve long since thought that application of business models a la software models would eventually catch on, and until then, have been focused on tying Balanced Scorecards and other strategic corporate strategy constructs in the BPM and workflow.
I look forward to more from Gartner on this.
18 Jacob Ukelson // Jan 7, 2010 at 9:20 am
Jim,
Since “seek and model” is one of the lynchpins of PBS – the ability to manage non-standard processes and exceptions will take on even more importance. It is like what you mentioned in your post on “Processes Enable Early Warning for Emerging Business Scenarios”.
The problem is that those emergent processes are exactly the unstructured, ad-hoc, human processes that most BPM suites and approaches don’t handle very well. For BPM vendors to start focusing on unstructured, ad-hoc, human processes will be a huge change for them, and require quite extensive overhaul of both their technology and approaches.
19 Don’t Let the Winds of Change Blow BPM Away // Feb 3, 2010 at 12:07 pm
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