The Future of BPM: Smarter, Simpler, Seamless

Here is where BPM has to move to gain widespread acceptance. It has to get Smarter, Simpler and be Seamless.

Smarter Process Management
Processes need to be able to manage themselves.

BPM runtimes should be able to automatically detect bottlenecks and add more people to a team based on defined policies.

For example a task could be assigned to normally be executed by a team of claims adjusters but in the case of a spike in work, after a storm for instance, the task could then be assigned to managers or skilled members on other teams.

Organizations have these business processes defined in policy guides and it makes sense that the next generation of BPM tools will be able to bring these policies to life. 

Automated Decision Management
Processes could be integrated with Decision Management systems in call centers and customer self service sites to ensure the business processes that get initiated react in the most appropriate way. Decision Management is very powerful when used as a stand alone tool but integrated with BPM provides seamless automated processing that adapts itself to individual business situations. 

Approach
Stop trying to drive BPM concepts to developers and talk to business users. We've been trying to focus on BPM as a productivity tool but we need to focus on the business benefits of managing a company's  competitive differentiators. These differentiators are their business processes and rules.

Very few businesses are focused on producing physical hard goods but instead are working on producing new services or "soft" products. The processes that are followed during the creation, launch and maintenance of these products is the key differentiator for organizations. 

Adoption
BPM tooling is mature but for a solution where it is critical to know who is executing what task single sign on has to be easily supported and leveraged. This should not be a techie feature but focused on how fast the BPM functions can be rolled out to users. "Look we are integrated with Netegrity, let's deploy this process into production" Support of OpenID would be useful here.

Seemless Integration
BPM vendors are acquiring CEP and business rules tools to expand their solutions, however their products are still not fully integrated other then though Web Services or APIs. Common UIs, authentication and authorization, repositories and deployment runtimes are required to avoid complexity when users try to combine the capabilities of these tools.

Process Mining
Business Intelligence is making great strides in the field of data mining. Applying data mining technology to BPM would enable the benefits of data mining to be applied in real-time. The results of process mining feeds back into Decision Management.