Where do you think BPM is going? Part II

Many of the major BPM vendors are working hard on the integration of CEP, BRMS and BPM functionality aiming for a unification of these "business modeling" capabilities. Since these vendors are focused on integrating existing function right now I'm very curious about what comes next. TIBCO clearly have had the lead with respect to CEP going back to early last decade when they were pushing the envelope with research and academic work in the field of event processing. Similarly iLog and Fair Isaac were the leaders in the area of Business Rules Management going back to the 90s. The CEP, BRMS and BPM products moved forward fairly independently of each other.

I'd like to give you a bit of background so you know where I'm coming from, if you're not interested just skip ahead to the heading "WHAT'S NEXT?"

In the early 2000s I was a using BEA WLPI 1.x (later known as WLI) and was just happy to have a functioning engine that was stable enough to survive a massive wave of new customer enrollments that hit the system when the newly deregulated electricity market opened in the Province of Ontario.

Looking back at that and my other BPM projects the usefulness of rules engines is so obvious I'm frankly flabbergasted that we at BEA soldiered on without a BRMS until the acquisition by Oracle. What were we thinking? Taking a fresh look at my old process models the benefits of a rules engine would have been at least as great as benefits we realized by implementing BPM. We had our relatively simple rules buried in relatively complex processes which kind of defeated one of the goals of BPM which is to make a system easier to change.

CEP would have been very interesting to use in the competition scenarios that we ran into when multiple electricity retailers tried to acquire the same customer. The temporal aspect of CEP means we could have done some real innovative stuff but my team and I did not have such a capability available to us so we had to make due with events mapped to processes which interfaced with a custom state machine. Our state machine took the concept of time into account so changing the event processing logic often resulted in changes to Java code.

So I'm sold on the idea of integrated rules management with BPM and have seen BPM projects that would have benefited from CEP.

However I'm also confident that there are other innovations that are coming to our field but what these next functional innovations will be is not clear to me right now.

WHAT'S NEXT?

What will be the next functional advancement for Business Process/Rules/Event Management?

Will it be Social BPM and how do you define that?

BPM Analytics, Business Process Mining?

Lightweight BPM for situations where the process makes itself up as it goes along?

Self aware BPM tools that apply mining algorithms to themselves to detect negative trends before they occur? Could IBM combine SPSS with BPM? What would a TIBCO or Appian do combined with SAS?

Let me know what your perfect next-gen BPM would be able to do. I have my ideas which I'll be posting in the next few weeks.