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?