bpmNEXT 2019 and Red Hat Summit 2019

In the next few months, I will have the opportunity to present at both bpmNEXT and Red Hat Summit.

Next week (April 15 - 17), bpmNEXT is taking place again in Santa Barbara, where lots of vendors in the BPM space (or whatever you prefer calling it nowadays - business automation, workflow, orchestration) are coming to showcase and discuss some of their latest achievements.  Check out the conference agenda for the full schedule.  I will be presenting on Wednesday on:

Automating Human-Centric Processes with Machine Learning
Kris Verlaenen, Red Hat

Many business processes involve human actors to perform some of the steps that are required to achieve the business goal.  In this context, human actors are typically expensive, can cause unwanted delay or become a bottleneck.  Automating some of these tasks can have a tremendous return on investment, and Machine Learning brings the missing bits to seamlessly automate work initially assigned to humans as soon as there is enough confidence in the expected outputs.  By integrating Machine Learning into our Red Hat Business Automation portfolio, customers can gradually start using Machine Learning to assist or gradually even replace the human actor(s) in a very simple manner, without even having to make any changes to the process definitions in their organisation.

Last year, the recordings were available almost immediately, so that should give everyone an opportunity to take advantage of the great presentations that are typically shown there.  I will also blog my impressions during the event as last years.

 

I will also attend Red Hat Summit this year, which is taking place in Boston on May 7-9.  I have a minitheater session where I will be talking about all the work we have been doing for our next generation architecture for cloud-native business automation.  We got a lot of exciting things we've been working on, so I'm really excited we'll be able to share this information with everyone soon.

Automating business operations in a hybrid cloud world
Kris Verlaenen, Red Hat

Business automation helps you automate the many processes and decisions in your applications. In the context of a hybrid cloud, we have been working on our next generation architecture to support process automation and decision management in a true cloud-native manner, taking full advantage of the cloud infrastructure and many of the recent technical advances in that context.  We will demonstrate how business automation simplifies building your own domain-specific applications, leveraging extremely small and efficient execution yet still taking advantage of a lot of the capabilities business automation could offer you as well (from managing human interaction, auditing to monitoring and admin operations).

If you are attending, feel free to reach out if you want to meet up!  But we'll share the same information with the wider community as well of course, so stay tuned !

bpmNEXT 2017 (part5)

Last half day of bpmNEXT is starting. Today I will up as the second presenter of the day, doing my demo on our case modeler and continuous task optimization.

Making business processes dance to the user's tune

Paul Holmes Higgin - Flowable Project

Paul introduced Flowable, a recent fork of Activiti (where most of that engineering team followed), and how it can be used for case management due to its dynamic modification capabilities that are coming in v6. In the example he showed, he dynamically added a new (not predefined) task or even a complete new process into a running instance. 

Supporting unstructured work

Kris Verlaenen - Red Hat

I presented on some of the challenges our customers are seeing in the context of unstructured work.  Firstly, modeling unstructured work confronts us with the limitations of existing standards like BPMN2, so we are presenting a higher-level model where the work is modeled as a number of stages, each containing any number activities.  It is however a visualization layer and developers can still rely on the capabilities of the underlying specification for the execution semantics.  Secondly, since unstructured work is typically unplanned, we are using continuous optimization (using OptaPlanner) for task assignment, so we can help users to work on the most important tasks first, taking into account user's constraints and preferences.

As an intermezzo, Lloyd presented on the Business Architecture Meta-Model, where they are trying to link a lot of the concepts that are used at different levels, linking Business Architecture to BPM concepts.  As we all agree that using a term like activity or process can be very ambiguous.  It's an OMG RFP where Lloyd invited everyone that might be interested to take a look.

Digital strategy deployment using business capabilities

Denis Gagne - Trisotech

Denis presented Trisotech Digital Enterprise Suite.  They are combining models and concepts at different level (like strategies and capabilities all the way to BPMN, DMN and CMMN models, etc.), and linking them for being to trace the relationship between all of these.   In the demo he showed an example where you could see how capabilities where implemented using processes (BPMN2) and decision logic (DMN).  Their landscaping tool (as they call it) can be used for brainstorming and collecting ideas, from free flow to based on existing models / approaches.  However, these ad-hoc models (as the result of the brainstorm) can later be linked to future models all the way up to the implementation.  Because models are connected, they can be used for getting executive overviews (for example related to maturity, performance, technical dept, etc.).  All of this information goes into one big digital enterprise graph.

With that, presentations are done.  Time to wrap up and start preparing for next year !

bpmNEXT 2017 (part 4)

Through a lens Starkly: transforming data into business information

E. Scott Menter - BPLogix

BPLogix is virtualizing data (possibly coming from a lot of different data sources) and aggregating it to get visibility in what is going on for business users.  The data flow analyzer allows you to drill down into your data, you can for example see how a chart is combining different queries to visualize key indicators (without knowing the technical details of the data).  Their tools allows users to define processes as a combination of activities with eligibility criteria (as they presented last year).  By combining this with their data analyzer, it allows you to clearly visualize what happened and based on what information (and to drill down further on where that data came from, etc.).

Process modeling and metrics: the next generation

Max Young - Capital Labs

Capital Labs is adding a third dimension to processes.  When performing simulation it is critical that it matches with reality.  Their tool, called BPM Scout, allows you to import processes from different tools, and then perform visual simulations on top of those.  But it allows multiple (3D) layers, where a process on the top layer can trigger for example rules on a different layer, etc.  Users can define their own advanced KPIs so you can show the value that the customer can expect.  It also interacts with management tools and allows you to generate full documentation (including simulation information) for your process.  And it allows you to export all your processes to for example IBM Blueworks (even with an application generated for you to start the process).

BPM with humans in the age of digital transformation

Francois Bonnet - ITESOFT W4

Francois is showing their tool that is trying to assist humans in their job.  At process definition time, it cannot only validate your BPMN processes, but assist the user in what the solution might be (for example adding missing elements).  The process also be simulated step by step.  Simulation can even compare the execution of a specific instance to the plan (gantt chart), giving information if you are ahead or behind the schedule.  Simulation supports concepts like timers and signal events etc.

Taking BPMN to infinity and beyond

Jakob Freund - Camunda

Camunda is presenting their next generation "Big Workflow" engine.  They have written a new version of their workflow engine with the idea of being able to scale this infinitely.  It is using publish-subscribe at it's core: rather than storing the state of an instance as a row in a traditional database, they are generating and storing event rather than updating that one row.  The events are written to a log file on file system and in a distributed setting it is replicated. This allows them to scale to 100x the throughput of their traditional engine.

Getting to know your users with Brazos CX insights

Scott Francis and Ivan Kornienko - BP3 Global

BP3 is presenting Brazos CX insights to help developers improve the usability of their applications for end users.  The tool is continuously measuring your application (load time, how the application is used, form validation errors, etc.).  Analysis learns you how much time users spent at different parts of your application, how much each area of your application is used (or not used), what the common validation errors are, etc.  And if necessary you can drill down even further to get more detailed information, all the way up to a timeline visualization of an individual session, or get average data for a large number of sessions.  Obviously all this information should be used to improve the usability of your application.

Cognitive customer service

Pramod Sachdeva - Princeton Blue

Princeton Blue is presenting their cognitive customer service solution.  It is monitoring customer interactions (from different possible resources like calls, emails, etc.).  Rules can be used to proactively monitor this data and create escalations, that can then be handled appropriately (for example through a process).  During this escalation, it can actually recommend what the most appropriate action might be.  Reports can be generated to slice-and-dice all this information in different ways (based on topic, customer type, sentiment, etc.).

bpmNEXT 2017 (part 3)

Starting the second day at bpmNEXT, where Edson is kicking off (with Bruce) on the DMN execution engine we've been working on on the Drools project.

An executable DMN solution for business users

Bruce Silver - methodandstyle.com, Edson Tirelli - Red Hat

Bruce and Edson are showing the first complete implementation of DMN. It's a collaboration of multiple companies, where Trisotech is providing a DMN modeler, Red Hat has a completely open-source DMN execution engine (as part of the Drools project - the first and currently the only implementation passing the full TCK) and Method and Style is offering a methodology and guardrails around it.

Bruce did a demo where he showed a decision table to define some decision logic and validation that will help you find potential issues with the table. Using a pre-qualification of a loan example, he showed a DRD to help find the interest rate of an applicant.  After executing the rule, the decision can be visualized by annotating it on top of the DRD diagram.

Edson zoomed in on various topics: how validation is done at several levels, an example using advanced expressions depending on level 3 DMN support, how to extend the language with a custom function and different ways of execution (from embedded to a REST service in the cloud).

Boost business process agility with DMN

Eduardo Chiocconi - Oracle

Oracle is showing their cloud-based DMN service that allows you to create and publish a DMN decision service.  Using an expense approval process, they showed how to first model the decision using DMN and then integrate the resulting decision service into a process. This is targeting business professionals rather than IT personnel.  By adding a decision service to the process (it is aware of which decision services are available) and mapping the inputs and outputs (in a graphical way, avoiding any scripting), the DMN service can be integrated in the process. By extracting the decision logic from the process itself, it has been given a separate life cycle and can be updated dynamically.

Making the standard real: the DMN TCK
Keith Swenson - Fujitsu

Keith presented the DMN TCK.  It's a set of DMN models (focusing on the most important use cases), input data sets and expected results (using an xml format for both).  Once a runner is provided (that is able to invoke the implementation of a particular vendor), it produces a CSV with the results. DMN supports multiple levels of compliance, where level 3 includes full FEEL support.  There currently are only a limited set of test cases, but Keith is asking everyone to submit their own test cases to extend the TCK.  Great results in one year, given that this was basically started from a discussion at his bpmNEXT presentation last year.

Decision enabled robotic process automation

Larry Goldberg - Sapiens DECISION

Larry presented a use case where process, decisions and robots were combined.  Data being sent in is first sent to a decision service (which he called the brain) to determine which robots (using RPA) need to be triggered to collect additional information from back-end systems.  Further validations by the brain and/or manual checks continue until the brain is satisfied.  This allowed the company to increase the number of transactions they were handling and at the same time reducing the amount of FTEs required to perform the work (as a lot of the data collection was automated using RPA). Larry showed how Sapiens DECISION can be used to define the underlying processes and decisions.

Accelerating digital transformation with an Open Cloud Platform

Harald Schubert - SAP

SAP presented their Cloud Platform, and more specifically the Workflow service in there.  He showed how to start a new process from scratch, with a simple process that included a human task.  When starting an instance of this process through their UI, this task obviously ended up in the task inbox. Internally they are using the open-source Activiti engine for execution.  SAP Cloud Platform comes with a lot of out-of-the-box platform services that can be integrated into the process, like for example a gamification service (and associated UI).  This service was called through the SAP Integration layer (as the process currently only supports REST calls).

bpmNEXT 2017 (part 2)

This afternoon the demos are starting, where the conference is again using the Ignite format: every presenter first has a 5-minute presentation (15s per slide) followed by 20min of live demo.  This format is used to force presenters to focus on the demo itself.

Creating a Digital Workforce with Robotic Process Automation

Anthony Yung - Kofax

Kofax is showing their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution.  As a use case he showed a "Customer due diligence process" (also called Know Your Customer) where a custom application is used to collect the necessary information about a customer and then a "robot" is used to analyze some of that information, for example do a google search on this customer and analyze the results.

He showed the Kofax designer where the google search was defined as a number of manual steps (open the google page, put in the query, perform the query, collect the results from the results page, etc.), without requiring any scripting.  This "robot" was then exposed as service (available through REST) so it can be reused.  These robots can then be called from your business processes as well.

BPM with Blockchain

Michuel Valdes-Faura and Lionel Palachin - Bonitasoft

Bonitasoft integrated their BPM platform with Blockchain, to achieve mostly the following advantages: allow multiple partners to trust the common process, customer engagement and end-to-end traceability. The use case they showed was a car order management process, where a car is being sold to a customer (including payment and notification).  The car is modeled as a Blockchain asset, and they implemented several connectors to interact with blockchain from the process, to for example create a transaction, etc.

They made a case for integration of BPM and blockchain in both ways: have your processes interact with blockchain but also having companies building on top of blockchain to use BPM to offer custom applications for their use case.

Real-time Process Deviance Monitoring

Michal Rosik, minit

Minit is using process mining techniques for deviance monitoring (i.e. searching for abnormal behavior at runtime). Their tools allows you to look at collected data (where it's not a requirement that the use case is already modeled as a process) from different perspectives, like frequency (how many time is some activity executed), time (which activity is causing delay), financial (what's the cost associated with each activity), etc.  The mined process diagram is annotated graphically with the relevant information.  By defining which variants are acceptable, at runtime they can monitor for any deviations using dashboards that show runtime information and allow you to drill down in case deviations are detected.  It is also applicable in the context of IoT, where a much larger number of events is typically expected.

Analytics for leveraging BPM assessment and management action

Jude Chagas Pereira, Frank Kowalkowski, Gil Laware - IYCON

Afterspyre uses analytics to look at data (that is pulled in from different data sources) to help analysts get better insights and make better decisions. For example, it can look at existing BPM data and help make decisions on which projects are most optimal to optimize, etc.  It can also compare two different processes to detect how much similarity they have, or they can be ranked based on different attributes.  Charts present this information at a higher level for managers to consume.  It also supports semantic analysis of text and keywords used in processes.

The recipe for successful digital transformation

Derek Miers - Structure Talent, MWD Advisors

Derek made the case that digital transformation isn't just process + technology & stir.  BPM isn't the silver bullet that will solve everything.  You have to engage your audience to get there.  Business transformation requires you to rethink and change everything you do (up to the entire structure of your company) and it needs to be customer-centric.

He presented a framework for business transformation that starts from understanding your customer's experience.  He mentioned BPM sometimes seems to be focusing much more on improving the existing processes rather than helping people to rethink them and to help co-create their future. Sometimes you need to redesign outside-in.  And BPM vendors should think about how they can help their customers doing that (rather than optimizing the process they don't need).

Now we're off to the roof top for some drinks and dinner !

bpmNEXT 2017 (part 1)

Back at Santa Barbara this year to attend the bpmNEXT conference, where I will be speaking on Thursday.  But before that will happen, we have a full 3 days of presentations and (even more important) demos from a lot of different vendors and experts.

BPM 2017-2021: Outlook for the Next Five Years

Nathaniel Palmer

Nathaniel is starting with a view of the BPM market from his point of view. In 2016, he predicted that the 3 R's (Robots, Rules and Relationships) will be defining the BPM market.  It's clear that rules have a significant impact on BPM nowadays as a way to drive decisions (for example with DMN). According to Google Trends, Robot Process Automation (RPA) is gaining more attention as well.  The interest in business processes is pretty stable (where BPMN is kinda following the same trend but just at a smaller scale). Digital Transformation is a term that has grown and is similar although BPM is still the overarching term that combines all of this.

Automation is forcing us to step away from the traditional architecture associated with BPM.  The future of BPMS vendors isn't just about process management but also includes automation, machine learning and decision management, all driven by an event-driven foundation.

Rather than predicting where BPM is going, he suggested we would all work towards defining it ourselves.  Or as he said, let's all "make automation great again"!

The Top 10 Technologies that will impact BPM in the next 5 years

Jim Sinur - Aragon Research

Jim, with his 50 (!) years of experience in IT, and many years of experience as analyst for BPM (for Gartner and Aragon Research nowadays), highlighted a few technologies he believes are going to be more and more important, including for example:

• Predictive apps get smarter (decision management is key)
• Big data and learning (using machine learning, deep learning and cognitive computing)
• Internet of things (standardization kicking off there now - resulting in a lot of smart devices at the edges and more goal-driven decentralized management)
• Rise of chatbots (moving to full language and action)
• Virtual Reality
• Work hubs (workbenches focused on specific roles)
• Drones
• Blockchain

Jim believes the Digital Business Platform (DBP) is what is / will be combining all these technologies (kinda disagreeing with Nathaniel there) as a place where business and IT collaborate.  Things like digital identity (including your preferences) and change management (across technologies) will be key.

The New Wave of Automation

Neil Ward-Dutton - MWD Advisors

Neil explained how a major shift in our experience of automation is underway.  Traditionally, we have been trained to work around limitations of automation (we are for example all used to pushing keys on computers the entire day), however that is changing, where automation is now changing for us.  Neil introduced 3 layers of change, called the 3 I's: Interaction (sending and responding more like humans - like chatbots), Insight (interactive analytics - like recommendation engines) and Integration (resources being exposed with open interfaces - like smark infrastructure).  Main drivers from his point of view are the rapidly changing technology, business pressures and familiarity of automation.  Use cases range from automating high-volume routine tasks to low-volume expert assistance and in between (make everyone as good as the best).

He concluded with some guidance for the audience (if we want to help define the future): embrace the shift to self-service, the shift to networked (cloud-based) platforms and the shift to learning systems.

The Great Migration: How to survive the leap from BPM as we knew it to the era of the digital workforce

Clay Richardson - Digital FastForward

Clay believes 75% of the current BPM programs nowadays won't survive the shift to digital.  He is no longer a BPM analyst at Forrester as he wanted to focus more on actually helping customers make the digital step (not just making them excited only). The challenge is not necessarily the technology but how to get (and keep) the right skills and mindset for digital transformation.  You will have to use approaches like hiring new talent, reinventing the workforce or outsourcing innovation (or all of the above). And help teams to design, validate and learn (using new methodologies and tools).  And it's not just about what you learn but how you learn: it needs to be interactive and immersive (learning gamification).  And put these people in front of the customer (even if it means leaving their comfort zone) so they learn about what it is they need.

Want to take this gamification to the extreme? Apparently you learn better when combining learning with escape rooms - even including the zombies - looking forward to that experience ! :)

Process-driven applications on Red Hat Summit 2016

Next week (June 27 - July 1st 2016), Red Hat Summit and DevNation are taking place again, in San Francisco.  As usual, it's a huge event with a ton of interesting talks.  Learn the latest and greatest from all different products Red Hat offers (cloud, data, automation, integration, you name it), with something for everyone (admins, architects, managers, etc.).

I'll be doing a session on Tuesday June 28, 3:30 - 4.30pm, on Process-driven applications: let BPM do some of your work.  It will be a (quick) overview of what we've been building out over the last few years with jBPM (and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite as the product offering) and how you can use it to build your applications.  But we give you the option to choose which building blocks you find valuable, and keep trying to add more and more value (for example in the context of case management or rapid application development).

I hope to see some of you in San Francisco, feel free to come and ask questions at my session, try to find me (or some of the other engineering team members) at the middleware booth, just say hi if you see me walking around somewhere or drop me a message if you can't find me but would like to meet up ;)

There are a lot of other interesting session, but highlighting a few others that are related (in chronological order):

• [Summit] Partners in crime from design to execution with Signavio and JBoss BPM Suite, Eric Schabell, Steven Lewandowski (Tuesday 10:15 - 11:15am)
  
• [Summit] A design model for rule and process-driven solutions, Justin Holmes (Tuesday 4:45 - 5:45pm)

• [Summit] Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite and BRMS primer: Capabilities, vision, and roadmap, Prakash Aradhya, Phil Simpson, Jeanine Bradley (Wednesday 10:15 - 11:15am)
  
• [DevNation] Drools 7.x happenings and roadmap, Mark Proctor (Wednesday 10:15 - 11:15am)
  
• [Summit] Automate and optimize logistic plans with BRMS Business Resource Planner, Geoffrey De Smet (Wednesday 11:30am - 12:30pm)
  
• [Summit] Effective decision management for an agile business, Mark Proctor (Wednesday 3:30 - 4:30pm)
  
• [Summit] BPM in financial services: Good advice from the real world (panel) (Thursday 4:45 - 5:45pm)

bpmNEXT 2016 retrospective

Concluding with a few impressions from bpmNEXT last week.  While it's impossible to summarize everything that happened there (I guess you could just join next year), here are some of my key takeaways:

• BPM has reached maturity stage, we're past the hype phase (at least that's what some of the analysts seem to be saying).  Innovation is still there, although more by the smaller players (typically in specific areas).  The main features of BPMS's are well understood.  Big vendors are trying to differentiate in other areas (sometimes even moving away from the BPM name).  As a result, BPM is becoming 'invisible': it's always there, people can always rely on the power it provides, but it has become more mainstream.
  
• Are BPM products growing or are they becoming part of a bigger ecosystem?  And what should we call this bigger entity then?  Luckily we didn't go into finding a new name, but there seems to be some agreement that we are (still) struggling with defining what BPM is (even after a few decades!).
  
• Open-source is an important aspect of the BPM eco-system, both for commoditization, free entry and for innovative research.
  
• A common misunderstanding is that low-code BPM is for business analysts only.  Low-code BPM tries to lower the entry barrier by hiding some of the underlying complexity and offering easier to use user interfaces / experience.  While this is an absolute requirement to get business analysts involved, low-code BPM can be just as useful for the hardcore developer as well (as long as they still have full control and can take advantage of the full power of the engine)!
  
• Most BPM vendors seem to moving towards supporting 'adaptive cases' or more 'unstructured processes' as well.  While there might be various approaches (like for example using the ad-hoc sub-process in BPMN2 vs calling a separate CMMN case vs some custom solution), I expect more convergence in the next few years.
   
• DMN was a hot topic amongst several vendors, gaining a lot of traction it seems.  CMMN seems to be struggling more though, and a healthy part of the discussion was around what we might learn from this and where it should lead us.
  
• Fun fact for those that attended: A tractor can actually look like a bison ! During one of the demos, Watson was used to do automatic recognition of images.  After uploading the image of a tractor, Watson decided it might be a bison.  While most of us found that funny (and it made bison one of the buzzwords of the conference), it might seem that Watson was right after all: apparently bison is a brand of tractors as well.  As we probably should have expected, AI is already smarter than us.
  

I blogged earlier about each of the presentations and demos on-site here: day 1 (part1 and part2), day2 (part3 and part4) and day3 (part5).  Recordings should hopefully be available soon on the bpmNEXT website as well.

Personally, I'd like to thank Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer (and everyone that helped, in or outside the spotlight) on organising this great conference !  And all the attendees as well for the interesting discussions.  It's a unique experience to have vendors discuss strategy in such an open way.  And the venue and conference schedule are ideal to continue discussions over lunch or during the evening (with a nice beer on the rooftop).

Already hoping I'll be able to come back next year !

bpmNEXT 2016 (part 5)

Final half-a-day of bpmNEXT presentations and demos, before heading back home.

Intent-driven and future-proof user experiences

Appian talked about UIs.  They have created an architecture called Sail UI using a server-side approach to UI and focusing on the intent of the UI (rather than the details / technology) so it can evolve over time. The same UI design can be applied to radically different architectures like GWT, Facebook React or native mobile apps.  The UI adapts automatically based on the environment (for example barcode scanning component behaves radically differently on desktop vs mobile).

Continuous integration: tools to empower DevOps in process-based application

Bonitasoft talked about testing processes using CI when doing live changes to your processes and applications.  Using Docker, JUnit and Jenkins, they run various tests on Jenkins on newer versions of the process to detect regressions.

Combining DMN with BPMN and CMMN - the open source way

Camunda showed how they implemented DMN (at least parts of) as a decision service.  DMN can be called from BPMN or CMMN using a decision task, or standalone.   Their Cockpit application allows you to figure out why certain decision have been made at runtime (for specific instances) by looking at the audit data - annotated on top of the decision table itself. 

How I learned to tell the truth with BPM

Gene Rawles is adding another dimension (yes, literally, 3D) to modeling processes, where you can have processes at different layers (2D) and use lines to connect them (in 3D), to simplify explaining what's actually going on for example.  They allow importing processes from different systems, and are not limited to processes but also a rules or a SOA (services) layer.

Self-managed agile organizations

Keith Swenson is ending the conference presentations with a talk on various topics:

• Self-management.  Using the term 'sociocrary', it's about self-managed teams which are highly decentralised and about collaboration (using consensus rather than voting - to get everyone on board with the decision).  How can we support these teams better?
• He made a distinction between token-based and state-based engines - where jBPM (since v5) definitely falls in the second category - and wondering if there's way to describe the difference and should we consider these in combination with BPMN or CMMN?
• He launched the question if there should be one (1!) open-source DMN engine for everyone to use, although this sparked the question whether this would be a reference implementation, which one to use and if there's still differentiation possible for vendors.
• And he wrapped up talking about the future, where he believes a more conversational model (focusing on easy interactions with the user rather than the process itself).

Unfortunately I'll have to miss the wrap up session, heading back to LA slightly early to catch my flight.

bpmNEXT 2016 (part 4)

The afternoon of day 2 is starting (after a long lunch break):

Decision modeling service

Oracle presented their decision modeling service, based on DMN, for extracting decision logic (for example from the process).  After a quick introduction to DMN and the Feel expression language, the demo dived into two examples to calculate cost and request approval.

Dynamic decision models

Jacob from OpenRules presented their decision analysis capabilities.  Decisions are typically a combination of a set of different rules, and using a web-based UI the user can activate and deactivate specific rules dynamically, to see how they influence the decision.  But they can even do what-if analysis to find the optimal solution, all based on the decision model already defined.

The dirty secret in process and decision managementt

Sapiens Decision Suite is analyzing business data (i.e. at the business level - business user friendly) that is going into decisions.  After hooking this business data (defined as a 'logical unit') up to actual data sources (supporting different types), you can generate a web service that represents the decision service.  Rather than the traditional approach of passing all the (low-level) data to the decision service to get your result (which might not even be possible in big data use csaes), this allows you to only pass business-level keys and the rest of the data is fetched on the fly from the underlying systems.

Business process management in the cloud: changing the playing field

IBM's perspective on (running processes on) the hybrid cloud and using analytics in there.  The demo is running a few processes on IBM BPM on Cloud and using services like Watson.  The claim process used Watson to recognize an uploaded image (as a car for example) and Spark machine learning for predictive analytics (based on previous data, create a model about how likely are we going to accept a claim).  The magic seemed to be in the services though, as from the process perspective it's just a matter of doing the right REST calls.

Model, generate, compile in the cloud and deploy ready-to-use mobile process apps

Orchestra BPMS is offering the ability to generate mobile applications for processes.  Rather than using a generic out-of-the-box mobile application, they offer different building blocks (to for example start new instances, a task list, audit capabilities, etc.) and after making your choice the application can be compiled and downloaded for iOS and Android.

Dynamic validation of integrated BPMN, CMMN and DMN

Trisotech is enabling companies to do digital transformation by using a 'digital enterprise graph' of the organisation and allows you to link concepts in different models. The 'Kommunicator' tool supports BPMN, CMMN (using a case task in the process model to call the case) and DMN (whenever you have a decision task).  Animation technology (across the different models) can be used for learning, validation and communication.

Simplified CMMN

Lloyd Dugan made (what he called) a modest proposal to drive adoption of CMMN, especially for use cases where BPMN really struggles to model in an understandable way.  For example by eliminating some of the CMMN constructs, mapping case management concepts to business architecture concepts, etc.  Could CMMN be the 'unification' that brings BPMN and DMN into a bigger world that BPMN and DMN can't describe on their own currently?

bpmNEXT 2016 (part 3)

Starting day 2 of bpmNEXT.  [Had to give my own presentation as well in this slot, and had to write this up afterwards, resulting in slightly shorter write ups.]

Cloud architecture accelerating innovation in application development

Salesforce showcased how to developed applications within their tool.  They offer two options at the modeling level, one more data-driven (by listening for and triggering data changes) and WorkRelay, which is the more traditional process available through their AppExchange partner ecosystem.  The demo included a significant mobile part and for example also the Wave Analytics capability that you can leverage.

One model, three dimensions: flow, case and time into a unified development

BP Logix presented a model where you define when tasks should execute as a combination of precedence (did x happen), eligibility (constraints) and necessity (do you need me).  Tasks will execute if all three are satisfied.  It also allows explicitly modeling and keeping track of goals etc.

Building advanced case-driven applications

In my own demo, I tried to explain how we are supporting adaptive and dynamic cases (which we see as an extension of processes rather than some different) - by supporting more advanced features like case roles, milestones, etc. on top of what we already have - a flexible BPMN2 process engine.  We also allow you to build custom applications - specifically tailored to the use case you're trying to solve -  by combining and customizing generic UI building blocks.

I'll do a more detailed blog, covering a lot of the details of what's underneath the hoods, once I get back from traveling.

BPM and enterprise social networks for flexible case management

Francois Bonnet talked about combining process with social network information to an aggregated view of what is happening at runtime. Information gathered into social profiles / and signals being exchanged between processes and the social network allow features like linking social discussions with process, aggregated time line (showing what happened in the process in combination with other social events), assignment using social data, etc.  At the model level, additional constructs allow specifying how signals should be exchanged.

A business process application with no process

Scott Francis from BP3 presented a use case related to outpatient care, where patient, doctor and nurses need to collaborate. With a strong focus (and track record) on design, the UIs nicely support mobile devices (a necessity in this context), where the application adapts itself to the available space (on the tablet or phone).  Regardless of where you are and what device you use, you always have access to the latest state.

bpmNEXT 2016 (part 2)

Continuation of bpmNEXT impressions.  Especially the BPM analyst panel was very interesting and spiked a lot of discussion !


BPM Analyst Panel
Maureen Fleming, Sandy Kemsley, Clay Richardson, Jim Sinur, Neil Ward-Dutton
From the analyst point of view, some remarkable trends:

• Customers don't necessarily want to start from process anymore, UI and UX are becoming the first more.
• Rather than a focus on process, we need immediate data analytics  and decisions.
• We need to get customers involved in the processes (apps, smart devices, etc.) and collect the data to drive these processes (and make them more transparent).
• Customers are looking for low-code solutions, even if that means not using BPM(S).  It just needs to be good enough.
• Open-source vendors are crucial for innovation and free(mium) entry. 
• Low-code BPM isn't about business analyst and prototype applications only, it's also for developers and enterprise applications.
• A lot has changed over the last 15 years,computing power and data is everywhere and millenials think differently.

Unanimous agreement that we need to continue this discussion over wine and beer later !

Process design and automation for a new economy

Ian Ramsey (8020 BPM) presented a model (targeting processes in the services sector) based on tasks and events and an event engine, to solve issues like maintainability, exceptions etc.  [Basically a declarative way to define processes rather than a procedural flow.]

A process is composed of stages, each containing tasks (using the typical blocks per stage each containing tasks).  Data is defined as (high-level) entities with possible states.  Tasks define start and outcome events (referencing the data states mentioned earlier), and the tool can generate a flowchart by combining all tasks.  He showed how you can define a rather complex model using this way, and how it dynamically adapts itself if you remove a tasks.

Process intelligence for the digital age: combining intelligent insights with process mining

SAP is combining process visibility and process intelligence with process mining to solve problems in realtime.  In the demo, dashboards are used to get insights into orders being processed, and figure out where they are stuck, to take immediate action. 
Process mining is used to do root cause analysis, and dynamically discovers the process model by looking at all the (low-level) events captured at runtime across systems (even for unstructured processes).  It allows you to filter on various properties of the live running instances and then allows you to see the process model for this selection, to detect issues with this subset.  You can then define additional KPIs to easily keep track of these instances.

Process Intelligence

Signavio presented a new component related to process analysis.  After uploading various logs and defining KPIs, it will perform an analysis and show dashboards that allow you to drill down into the details.  The data can be overlaid on top of the process model to for example show most used paths, deviations from the process model, etc.

Leveraging cognitive computing amd decision management to deliver actionable customer insight

Princeton Blue showed their cognitive computing solution that monitors customer events (from for example social media or other unstructured data) to combine it with BPM, BRMS and CEP.  Pramod used an elaborate example that used data collected from customer profilies and twitter feeds and rules and event processing to analyze this.  Based on IBM Watson they were able to categorize user sentiment as positive, negative, angry, etc. (and he mentioned that open-source like Drools could also be used as rules and complex event processing engine as an alternative).

Dealing with digital disruption

Jim Sinur talked in more depth about digital transformation, which companies cannot ignore if they want to stay relevant in the future (as it's going to happen anyway).  But this digital transformation introduces disruption on multiple levels, with strong demand for continuous business agility and change.  His advice was to focus on differentiating features for your business.  And you'll inevitably end up with legacy and new working together (at least short-term).  And process might be the secret sauce of digital business.

Now we're off to the roof for some whine tasting, and no doubt continue the discussions.

bpmNEXT 2016 (part 1)

This year, I'm attending bpmNEXT for the first time.  

It a nice conference, currently the 4th year, where BPM vendors, analysts and researchers collectively show their innovation, vision and research and discuss among each other.

Now in its fourth year, bpmNEXT is the definitive showcase of the next generation of Business Process Management software – including intelligent operations, the Internet of Things (IoT), case management, business decision management, and goal-directed processes.

Download Brochure

bpmNEXT has consistently been the defining launch pad for the ideas and innovations surrounding technology-led business process innovation. Presentations are not case studies of past successes, but vision statements on where we need to go next.
This is no typical “how to” conference aimed at BPM newcomers. It is designed specifically for those already chest deep in BPM and wanting to get in early on the next generation of process innovation technology – touch it, see it, and influence it.
- See more at: http://www.bpmnext.com/#sthash.Q0RZDMoe.dpu

I'm presenting on 'Case-driven applications' on the second day, but looking forward to see what others have planned as well.  And the discussions and networking around it of course, probably one of the best selling points of this conference (although the Santa Barbara location comes close as well ;)).

Here's a quick overview (from my point of view) about some of the key topics of the first half of day 1.

BPM 2016-2020
Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer are kicking off, with an outlook for the next 5 year, how all companies (and he gave Tesla as a prime example) are becoming software companies, where there's increasing focus on process and the battle for the end user is turning into a battle of easy-to-use UIs (not UI, but a combination of multiple different UIs).

Schroeder's BPM revisited
Neil Ward-Dutton talked about digital transformation, as a digital thread that you have to weave globally across your entire organization (and even outside that boundary to customers) that focuses on decisions, agility, etc.  There's need for a platform to manage your knowledge efficiently.  And BPM offers a lot of building blocks to achieve this, but maybe it's time to think about rethinking / repackaging some of this to focus on the customer's bigger picture.

Positioning Business Modeling
Panel: Clay Richardson, Denis Gagne, Kramer Reeves (Bruce Silver moderator)
BPM modeling can no longer be seen as something separate, as when talking about modeling there's other areas like modeling cases, decisions, organizations, KPIs, etc. and they are all related.  Is this 'business modeling' and how do we bring them together, how do we as vendors sell this story to analysts and customers?

• Incredible appetite from business analysts for building (almost any kind of) models to quickly prototype
• How do we measure ROI?
• BPM has operational automation benefits
• Is it about speed to market?
• Capturing knowledge in a standardized way (for long-term sustainability)
• Is the BPM approach sustainable?  Can we keep adding more models / adding more capabilities as minimal requirements to BPM products?
• Aren't some models throw-away (high-level communication vehicles rather than operational model)?

While there's no clear answers on some of these questions, I guess the consensus seemed to be that we can all work together on this to make a bigger pie for all of us.

Building a Value-Added BPM Business
Panel: Pramod Sachdeva, Scott Francis, Jonathan Sapir (Nathaniel Palmer moderator)
How, from a customer's point of view, is the market changing?  What are customers looking for?

• Customers are looking for much more than just a process, they are looking for complete solutions.
• Is BPM shifting, or are the applications that we are building with BPM shifting?  Are BPM products growing or are they becoming part of a bigger ecosystem?
• Can we get end users more involved?  Can everyone (end users, developers, QE, etc.) each participate at their level? What is preventing this, as this isn't purely a technological issue.
• What skillsets are required when looking for business analysts or IT to be involved in such an effort?
• We need to be realistic about what end users can change, by constraining what they can change we might be able to allow them to do so.  For example by extracting decision logic in rules (that could be updated).
• We want to give users a low-code environment where they can take control.

Process-driven applications at Devoxx 2015

I just finished my presentation at Devoxx this year, on process-driven applications.  The conference is a lot of fun, with a big Red Hat presence, talking about JBoss Middleware, OpenShift, Red Hat Developer program and a lot more.

It wasn't the regular presentation where we try to showcase all capabilities and list all the features of our project (as most people probably have seen one of those at some point already), but I wanted to focus on something special instead.

The project has evolved significantly in the last few years, and I believe we have now reached a point where we have a lot of building blocks in place to help you develop your application.

Rather than focusing on the technology, process-driven application development starts from a different goal, i.e. building something customized to what you need. By taking advantage of the workbench, you can build and execute your processes as usual, but rather than relying on the generic tooling we provide, you have access to all data and features we offer out-of-the-box, but combine them in a customized way.

In the demo, I built out a small expenses process, and a custom screen (using AngularJS) that can list my current expenses and create new ones just the way I want to.  You can even add some small dashboards to keep track of the number of open expense reports or a quick overview of how many expense reports you submitted in the last year and when.

I also showed how to support more flexible and adaptive cases, where you want to give the end user the capability to make decisions or to dynamically add new tasks (all the way to the extreme where you don't define anything upfront but start a new ad-hoc case).  And obviously you can combine both, creating a custom application to drive your patient cases:

(click to enlarge)

My slides are available here.  The presentation itself was recorded and is available (for free) as well:

Devoxx Belgium (November 9 - 13)

Devoxx Belgium 2015 is from November 9th until 13th, and is expecting no less than 3.500 Devoxxians to come to Antwerp again.  Red Hat has always had a strong presence there (both on the conference schedule and around, in BOFs, on the booth area, etc.) and this year is going to be no different! 

From our team, Mario Fusco and Geoffrey Desmet will be joining (with a Java8 presentation and an ignite session respectively), and I'll be giving a presentation on process-driven application development on Thursday:

Even the simplest application ideas always end up requiring more development than you hoped for: maintaining long-lived state, interaction with other services or human actors performing some of the work, showing current status of ongoing requests, management and reporting, etc. Business processes and rules allow you to externalize some of that logic and dynamically update it, but you don't want your business process management (BPM) system to get in your way either. And every application is different, so you want to be able to fully control every bit of it.

Using process-driven application development, you define your application logic in a (flexible) business process, but you also expect your BPM system to help you out with much more than that. In this session we will show you live how to quickly get new web applications up and running by relying on jBPM to provide some of the UI (should you want to), or even to generate parts of your application for you (that you can customize later), so you can focus on what makes your application different. jBPM uses the power of open source and it's flexible architecture to let you decide what you need: nothing more, nothing less.

If you look at the entire schedule or speaker list, you'll find a lot of other interesting Red Hat speakers like Aslak Knutsen, Charles Nutter, Antoine Sabot-Durand, Clement Escoffier, Dimitris Andreadis, Diogenes Rettori, Paulo Lopez, Roland Huß and Xavier Coulon (I hope my quick search didn't miss anyone).

Hope to see you there !

jBPM on Red Hat Summit / DevNation

From June 21st - 26th, Boston will be the place to be for the Red Hat Summit and DevNation 2015 conferences.

This year, I'll be presenting two sessions on Summit:

Process-driven application development using Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite
Kris Verlaenen — jBPM Project Lead, Red Hat

Wednesday, June 24 (10:40 am - 11:40 am)

Enabling business users to update their applications and processes is an integral part of business automation. Doing so requires rich client web technology and a powerful workbench to customize and extend business rules management (BRM) and business process management (BPM) solutions.

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite is a flexible and powerful BPM platform, offering business process modeling, execution, and monitoring capabilities for numerous use cases. It can be used in different environments, and, as a result, the platform can be integrated in multiple architectures and configured in detail. The platform can be customized to provide customer-specific enhancements.

In this session, you will:

• View a live process-driven application demo.
• Discover the top technical things you need to know about the latest version of JBoss BPM Suite.
• Get answers to some of the most asked questions.
• Learn the truth about BPM myths.
• Find out what’s next for JBoss BPM Suite.

Continuously improve your processes with Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite
Kris Verlaenen — jBPM Project Lead, Red Hat

Thursday, June 25 (1:20 pm - 2:20 pm)

Business process management (BPM) lets your business operate smoothly and in a controlled manner. But to get the results you want, you have to be willing to continuously improve your processes. Join us to see how jBPM and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite help you continually improve your processes.

We will explain and demo how to:

• Collaborate on designing processes.
• Manage your processes using multiple repositories and projects.
• Promote business assets (from development to production).
• Execute different versions of your processes in parallel spaces.
• Perform process instance migration.
• Implement a new functionality as a process. 

[Credits for this proposal go out to Maciej, who did most of the work]

I won't be presenting on DevNation this year, but I'll definitely be around as well, for some late night coding and if necessary some beers :) Let me know if you're planning to attend and would like to meet up at some point !

There will be numerous other interesting Summit presentations where jBPM will be involved as well, for example:

• The speed of business: Performance techniques for Red Hat JBoss BPMS (Salem Elrahal, Brad Davis - Thursday, Jun 25, 10:40 AM - 11:40 AM)
• Business process automation roadmap: Tackle application backlogs with BPM (Mark Proctor, Prakash Aradhya, Phil Simpson - Thursday, Jun 25, 3:40 PM - 4:40 PM)
• Accelerate your BPMS web application development (Andy Yuen - Friday, Jun 26, 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM)
• Build an enterprise application in 60 minutes with JBoss Middleware (Phil Simpson, Javier Perez, Kenneth Peeples - Friday, Jun 26, 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM)

And a lab as well, on integration with Fuse:

• Racing Camel with BPM and Red Hat JBoss Fuse [Lab] (Eric D. Schabell, Christina Lin - Wednesday, Jun 24, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM)

jBPM at DevConf 2015

Maciej reports that he'll be presenting at DevConf 2015 in Brno:

I am happy to announce that a talk and workshop about jBPM 6 has been accepted at DevConf 2015 in Brno.

Talk: jBPM - BPM Swiss knife

During the presentation jBPM will be introduced from the Process Engine & framework perspective.The main goal of the session is to share with the community of developers how they can improve their systems implementations and integrations by using a high level, business oriented methodology that will help to improve the performance of the company. jBPM will help to keep the infrastructural code organized and decoupled from the business knowledge. During the presentation the new APIs and new modules in jBPM version 6 will be introduced for the audience to have a clear spectrum of the tools provided.

Speaker: Maciej Swiderski

Workshop: Get your hands dirty with jBPM 

This is continuation of the presentation of jBPM (jBPM - BPM swiss knife) that introduces to jBPM while this is mainly focused on making use of that knowledge in real cases. On this workshop users will be able to see in action jBPM from both perspectives:

• as a services when jBPM is used as BPM platform
• as embedded when jBPM is used as a framework in custom applications

This workshop is intended to give a quick start with jBPM and help users to decide which approach is most suitable for their needs.

Speakers:

Jiri Svitak

Maciej Swiderski

Radovan Synek

Schedule for the complete conference can be found here. See you there!!!

Deep Dive into jBPM6 video (Red Hat Summit 2014) available

The recording of my Red Hat Summit 2014 presentation and demo is now available.

It gives a quick introduction on jBPM6, a demo of the web-based tooling and then a deep dive in some of the details on the new jBPM execution server.

Enjoy !

Come meet us at Red Hat Summit in SFO

This week, Red Hat Summit is taking place in San Francisco, and a lot of us (engineer, product management, solution architects, etc.) will be there at the Moscone Conference Center.  If you are attending Summit or DevNation (the developer-oriented conference co-located with Summit), feel free to come and see Mark Proctor's presentations on Drools / JBoss BRMS and/or my presentation on jBPM / JBoss BPM Suite.

There will be plenty of opportunities to meet us as well, like for example the DevNation hacknight on Wednesday, but should you want to meet up but can't find us, try reaching out to us on twitter, @markproctor or @KrisVerlaenen.

There will also be plenty of opportunity to go and watch one of the demos at the JBoss booth, and the Usability Team has set up booth as well where you can go and check out JBoss BPM Suite 6 and provide feedback, so definitely go take a look.

Hope to see you all there, hopping in my flight now !

jBPM empowers Magnolia CMS

Maciej reported in his blog that Magnolia CMS uses jBPM 5 as their default work flow engine in version 5.

Just two weeks ago I had a pleasure to talk about jBPM (both v5 and v6) at Magnolia conference in Basel, Switzerland. This was a great event that I recommend everyone that is interested in CMS.

Together with Espen from Magnolia team, we made a really nice presentation about both jBPM and Magnolia Workflow that utilizes jBPM.

Here you can find the presentation: