« BPM 2.0 Enables Leveraging Information in New Ways | Home | Are Process Standards for Real? »
BPM 2.0 Leverages Agility in New Ways
By Jim Sinur | July 1, 2008
In the BPMS today, agility mostly appears in the ability of adjusting decision points in a fixed process usually visible through a process flow. There is more to agility than what is delivered in most of the BPMS engines today.
Agility is defined as the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly to exercise nimble movements easily. Having a broader view of agility allows for more opportunities to expand the dynamic behavior of business processes.
While I think that an agility opportunity around decision making in the flow of processes is extremely important, there are additional opportunities around business actions, people optimization and technology fluidity that can play in the next generation of BPM.
BPM 2.0 Expands the Tweak Points in a Process:
Today, most agility is aimed at process control flows, but there are many more opportunities to impact process behavior. BPM 2.0 will help control outcomes by adding coordinated agility around goals and tolerances.
Process managers will be able to dynamically change the goals and their balance to create outcomes that meet conflicting goals while staying efficient by allowing coordinated tolerances to be set to match the new goals given to the process.
In addition, processes will recognize relevant events that might change a course of action on a specific case and/or a class of process instances.
At a maximum, the recognition of certain events and/or tolerance statuses might suggest an opportunity for a new round of optimization and/or a change in goals. So goals, tolerances and event recognition are some of the new tweak points that enable a new dimension of agility added to the traditional decision nodes in a process.
BPM 2.0 Adds More Intelligence to Complex Decisions:
Today, process decisions tend to be simplistic and process engines can handle these natively. BPM 2.0 will require more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of heuristics and other forms of decision making.
Intelligent processes should be recognizing conditions that will require intervention. This means recognizing the effect of aggregated and/or complex events that might be of interest to a process manager and giving advice on the likelyhood of making some kind of adjustment.
In advanced capabilities, the process might suggest alternative courses of action with a likely success percentage for each course of action.
BPM 2.0 Puts SOA Concepts on Steroids:
In the ultimate scenario, BPM 2.0 would not only orchestrate services and pseudo services (impure wrapped legacy services and/or composite flows), but BPM 2.0 would also perform dynamic orchestration that would change the sequence of invocation depending on conditions.
The conditions could be sensed dynamically by event recognition and/or agent/flocking agent behaviors. Process snippets and composite flows would be available and treated as service assets.
In addition to the ability to swap services dynamically based on positive/negative business and/or technical outcomes, BPM 2.0 will dynamically orchestrate services.
We will see this concept leveraged to content and micro content in dynamic aggregation for the creation of proper content for clients and other process participants.
I would call this content oriented architecture (COA). This approach would also be appropriate in creating a dynamic set of people and skills to face the incoming workload in a dynamic fashion, thus yielding people oriented architecture (POA).
BPM 2.0 Rules Outside the Actual Process:
Today, most of the rules are contained inside the process context itself, but in the world of BPM 2.0, there will be rules outside the process in the form of constraints and distributed agents. When process can be ultimately flexible, there needs to be boundaries that processes should not go beyond without some form of notification to the process manager and/or process worker. In addition agents should be snooping for conditions of interest to the process manger.
BPM 2.0 Has a Better Handle on Process Context:
BPM 2.0 takes advantage of process intelligence. Even though a process may be as optimized as possible, there are changing conditions in the market place and your client base that need to be brought to light. The clues for these trends are seen in the process and it’s outcomes as well as complex events detected and/or alerts emitted by agents employed by the process managers. Many processes are evolving and need to be goal directed and collaborative in nature. Process Intelligence can help identify patterns for governance.
Bottom Line:
BPM 2.0 leverages agility in a supercharged way to deliver processes that can adapt and adopt in an instant, if needed. As we enter the kind of complexities that evolving processes bring, I expect more rapid evolution of agility leverage.
Topics: BPM |