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.