Virtual Red Hat Summit 2020, April 28-29

Next week Red Hat Summit 2020 will be held, not in San Francisco as we were hoping, but as a virtual event.  While this unfortunately won't give us the possibility to meet in person, a lot of the keynotes and breakout sessions will be held online.

Virtual Red Hat Summit is completely FREE, so if you haven't done so yet, register today!

Below is an overview of various sessions around business automation.  So if you're looking for the latest news on Kogito, our next gen cloud-native business automation toolkit, or how to leverage Red Hat Process Automation Manager and Decision Manager for use cases that involve microservice orchestration or machine learning, or to hear from our customers.  But take a look at the full agenda as well.

There will also be an opportunity to come and chat with us in the community area.  After signing in, click Explore and open up the "Middleware & cloud applications" Community Central chat room to ask questions!  Or you can just join our KIE chat channels we announced recently anytime.

Below is the list of presentations around business automation that I am aware of !

The state-of-the-art of developer tools to build business-intelligent apps for RHPAM v7 and Kogito
Eder Ignatowicz (Red Hat), Alex Porcelli (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Tuesday, April 28, 1:00 pm EDT
• EMEA: Tuesday, April 28, 7:00 pm CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 8:00 am SGT

Empowering Amadeus’ competitive advantage with cloud-native decision making on Quarkus
Matteo Casalino (Amadeus), Giacomo Margaria (Amadeus), Mario Fusco (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Tuesday, April 28, 2:00 pm EDT
• EMEA: Tuesday, April 28, 8:00 pm CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 11:00 am SGT 

Modern business workflows as microservices: How we won with Red Hat Process Automation Manager
Mauro Vocale (Red Hat), Giovanni Marigi (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Wednesday, April 29, 11:00 am EDT
• EMEA: Wednesday, April 29, 10:00 am CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 3:00 pm SGT

Why building intelligent cloud-native business applications is easier with Kogito
Kris Verlaenen (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Wednesday, April 29, 1:00 pm EDT
• EMEA: Wednesday, April 29, 1:00 pm CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 4:00 pm SGT

Cloud, sweet cloud: Feeling at home with serverless decision making using Kogito and Camel-K
Daniele Zonca (Red Hat), Edoardo Vacchi (Red Hat), Luca Burgazzoli (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Wednesday, April 29, 2:00 pm EDT
• EMEA: Wednesday, April 29, 5:00 pm CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 5:00 pm SGT

Integrating scalable machine learning into business workflows
Rui Vieira (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Wednesday, April 29, 2:00 pm EDT
• EMEA: Wednesday, April 29, 5:00 pm CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 5:00 pm SGT

Solve the unsolvable: Why artificial intelligent systems can solve planning problems better than humans
Satish Kale (Red Hat), Geoffrey De Smet (Red Hat)

• NA & LATAM: Wednesday, April 29, 2:00 pm EDT
• EMEA: Wednesday, April 29, 5:00 pm CEST
• APAC: Wednesday, April 29, 5:00 pm SGT

Transforming decision automation to be cloud-based and FaaS-like at BBVA
Antonio Valle Gutierrez (BBVA), Beatriz Alzola (BBVA), Marcos Regidor (Red Hat)

This is available on demand so no specific timing.

BBVA is a Red Hat Innovation Award 2018 winner !

Today, BBVA was announced as one of the Red Hat Innovation Award 2018 winners !

BBVA is a customer-centric, global financial services group based in Spain. BBVA chose to make Red Hat technology a key piece of its new cloud platform.  BBVA built its platform using several solutions, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite.

You can ready the full success story here.

As a result, we have been working very closely with them over the last year, and very excited to see all of that hard work showcased here! I have a presentation on Thursday with BBVA on this topic, see if you are attending Red Hat Summit, hope to see you there !

Migrating to a container-based Cloud BPMS platform at BBVA

Antonio Valle Gutierrez (BBVA), Marcos Regidor, Kris Verlaenen (Red Hat)

[If you're not attending, I recently did a presentation + demo at bpmNEXT about our cloud strategy as well, so if you're interested in the topic, hope this might be useful as well]

Red Hat Summit in San Francisco 2018 (May 8th - 10th)

This year, Red Hat summit is again in San Francisco, and I'm excited to be able to attend again.  We're kicking off today, but I personally have a presentation on Thursday afternoon (co-speaking with a customer on our BPM cloud strategy), and a jBPM Birds of Feather session on Wednesday with Maciej (where anyone can just walk in to come and talk or ask questions), but more about that later.

We're kicking off with the keynotes.  If you're interested, you can watch the keynotes live at https://www.redhat.com/en/summit/2018 (or in replay later). This first keynote already includes a live demo (by Burr Sutter and team) showing a true hybrid cloud (combining private and public cloud).

And an awesome extra: this year Business Optimizer (Optaplanner) is used for scheduling all the different sessions, and got a honorable mention by Jim Whitehurst during his keynote. 

"It really is a fenomenal tool!"
Jim Whitehurst - Red Hat President and CEO

 Business Optimizer is part of our Red Hat Process Automation Manager product (formerly known as Red Hat BPM Suite).  Congratulations to the team!

 

This year has record attendance (7.000+), a ton of breakout sessions (325) and even more opportunities to talk to the experts directly.  If you are around and would like to talk, we'll be happy to see you in one of our sessions !  There's quite a few people from our team here, to try and help you with whatever questions you might have.

Migrating to a container-based Cloud BPMS platform at BBVA

Antonio Valle Gutierrez (BBVA), Marcos Regidor, Kris Verlaenen (Red Hat)

jBPM BoF: Let's talk processes - Wed 11h45am - 12.30pm

Kris Verlaenen, Maciej Swiderski (Red Hat) - Moscone West - 2103

So just reach out (at the booth or through social media) and we would love to hear your thoughts.  Hope to see you here !

bpmNEXT 2018 day 3

Part of a series of blog posts about bpmNEXT 2018:
bpmNEXT 2018 kicking off!
bpmNEXT 2018 day 1 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 3 

When Artificial Intelligence meets Process-Based Applications

Nicolas Chabanoles and Nathalie Cotté - Bonitasoft

Rather than just relying on reporting for insight in your processes, adding Artificial Intelligence is taking it a step further towards being able to create a shorter feedback look, do predictions, etc.  Using a custom loan request application, they show how data is extracted from the database into ElasticSearch, after which they build a predictive model from that.  Using process mining techniques they apply time-based analysis to predict the likeliness of certain requests still able to reach their SLA (or not).  Based on that information the operational people can decide which requests to prioritize.

Understanding Your Models and What They Are Trying to Tell You

Tim Stephenson - Know Process

Searching and looking into your process models can become complex if you have lots of processes.  By indexing these processes, a quite nifty query language can then be used to go and query those models.  Search for processes, data and resource involved, etc.  While the theory sounds nice, in reality it didn't always seem to be that simple.

Exploiting Cloud Infrastructure for Efficient Business Process Execution

Kris Verlaenen - Red Hat

My own presentation, about executing processes in a cloud environment in a distributed manner.  We've introduced services like controllers (to keep track of your engines running everywhere and manage them), and smart routers (to route requests to the right engine and aggregate data across them).  Our monitoring console allows you to connect to any engine out there (in this case a engine embedded in a sample order application deployed on a Minishift instance).  In the demo I showed how you can then update the SLA expectations of the embedded process, and after deploying this new version of the project monitor for changes.

Dynamic Work Assignment

Lloyd Dugan - Serco

In the context of Obamacare, Lloyd presented a use case of improving task assignment by scoring tasks (based on eligibility, severity, etc.) and assigning them to the right people.  Replacing a model where tasks were mostly just kept in queues and workers needed to go and go pick them up and choose, it allows tasks to be put "on hold" so they temporarily would not show up in the queues.
Geoffrey would have loved to see this, as I think the combination of process and rules was nice for solving this issue, but imho it's missing an actual constraint solving component (like OptaPlanner) to do the score calculations.

Finally, Keith Swenson presented about the DMN Technology Compatibility Toolkit (TCK).  Unfortunately I had to leave early to catch my flight, so just linking the video here.

bpmNEXT 2018 day 2 (part 2)

Part of a series of blog posts about bpmNEXT 2018:
bpmNEXT 2018 kicking off!
bpmNEXT 2018 day 1 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 3 

RPA Enablement: Focus on Long-Term Value and Continuous Process Improvement

Massimiliano Delsante - Cognitive Technology Ltd.

The myInvenio tool can be used to discover processes based on data already collected.  It will derive the process (the tasks, actors, sequence, etc.) from the data and cross-check that with the cases that are already recorded (for example see which are deviating, where time is spent, etc.).

This information can then be used to derive which activities might be the best candidates for automation.  By running a simulation, you can decide for example to add two robots for automating one of the steps (at least the simple cases) and keep one employee for more complex and exceptional cases.

Integration is Still Cool, and Core in your BPM Strategy

Ben Alexander - PMG.net

PMG provides drag and drop low-code processes, with pre-built connectors.  The process included human tasks for approval, but also supported integration with email, phone or text, or slack, etc.  It contacts external services (like Azure ML) for risk assessment, and included some RPA integration.

Making Process Personal

Paul Holmes-Higgin and Micha Kiener - Flowable

Chat is becoming more and more an important communication channel for customers.  Flowable showed an example of how banks are using lots of different channels to communicate with customers, like a chatbot, and using BPMN2 and CMMN during conversations.  

A digital assistant is constantly helping the client advisor during his conversation by creating (sub)cases, advising actions, etc.  For example, it can help enter a client address change, validate the information, ask validation, send confirmation emails, involve a compliance officer if necessary, etc. Behind the scenes, the digital assistant is backed by a process (with forms etc.).  Finally, integrating Machine Learning can be used to replace some of the manual steps.

Robotics, Customer Interactions, and BPM

Francois Bonnet - ITESOFT

A demo with an actual (3d printed, open-source) robot !  Francois brought a robot with video and voice recognition capabilities.  The robot could be used for example in a shop for greeting clients.  Voice recognition can be used to start a process (for example when the customer comes in).  The robot can respond to several commands, follow, do face recognition, take pictures, etc. all by configuring various processes.  The voice and face recognition isn't always working perfectly yet, but interesting to see anyway !

The Future of Voice in Business Process Automation

Brandon Brown - K2

Voice recognition can be used to create a chatbot.  The chatbox can for example be used to request PTO, get your tasks (and complete or even delegate them).  But chatbots aren't great for everything.  Some data is just easier to provide in a structured form.  But even forms can be enhanced with for example sentiment analysis (to automatically update the data based on the sentiment detected from the text provided in the form).  You can then for example create standard processes for how to respond to certain sentiments.

State Machine Applied to Corporate Loans Process

Fernando Leibowich Beker - BeeckerCo

Processes can be unstructured and rely on rules for defining when tasks should be triggered or not.  The demo is using IBM BPM state machine in combination with IBM ODM where the rules define what the next state will be based on the current state and the input.

bpmNEXT 2018 day 2

Part of a series of blog posts about bpmNEXT 2018:
bpmNEXT 2018 kicking off!
bpmNEXT 2018 day 1 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 3 

An awesome surprise this year, the videos from yesterday are already available on youtube!  So I've updated my posts from yesterday with the links, amazing job!

BPM 2018-2022: Outlook for the Next Five Years

Nathaniel Palmer

Nathaniel is starting with an outlook of where we are (maybe?) going in the next few years.  The three R's that will define BPM in his point of view are Robots, Rules and Relationships.  With everything running in the cloud.  And using Blockchain ;) 

Interaction has already significantly changed (with everyone having a smartphone), but he predicts the smartphone (as we know it) will go away in the next five years - with consumer adoption of new interfaces accelerating even more.

Robots (including any kind of smart device or service) will represent customers in various interactions.  And will do a lot of the work done by employees nowadays.  Even autonomously. This all will have an impact to application architectures, almost introducing a 4th tier in typical 3-tier architectures.

The future-proof BPM platform (aka the Digital Transformation Platform) brings together various capabilities (like Workflow Mgmt, Decision Mgmt, Machine Learning, etc.) - possibly from different vendors - processing events from many different sources (services, IoT devices, robots, etc.).

And he ended with the advice, that the best way to invent the future, is to help create it !

A Next-Generation Backendless Workflow Orchestration API for ISVs

Brian Reale and Taylor Dondich, ProcessMaker

ProcessMaker is showcasing their cloud-based process service.  It exposes a REST api for interacting with it, and has connectors to various external services.  The service does not come with a BPMN2 designer, but they accept BPMN2 and offer a programmatic interface to create processes as well.  They also introduced a "simplified" designer that ISVs can use to define processes (that underneath exports to BPMN2 as well), but hides a lot of the more complex constructs available.

CapBPM’s IQ – No-code BPM development – Turning Ideas into Value

Max Young, Capital Labs

To avoid being locked into one vendor, IQ is offering a generic web-based user interface for BPM, that can be used on top of various underlying BPM platforms.  On the authoring side you can define process and data models and do different kinds of analysis.  In the end, it generates open-source application code that work with a specific product (that your developers can use as a starting point).

Monitoring Transparency for High-Volume, Next-Generation Workflows

Jakob Freund and Ryan Johnston - Camunda

Camunda is showing Zeebe, their next generation process execution platform.  The demo starts when an arbitrage opportunity is detected, and then does various risk calculations. Zeebe Simple Monitor is a web-based monitoring tool to look at deployed processes and running instances.  With Optimize you can create and look at reports based on the various events that Zeebe is generating, including charts, heat maps, alerts, etc.

And as a treat, they showed a doom like easter egg inside their Cockpit, where you can walk through your process "dungeon" and shoot tokens with your shotgun :)

bpmNEXT 2018 day 1 (part 2)

Part of a series of blog posts about bpmNEXT 2018:
bpmNEXT 2018 kicking off!
bpmNEXT 2018 day 1 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 3 

Decision as a Service (DaaS): The DMN Platform Revolution

Denis Gagné - Trisotech

Denis is showing the progress Trisotech has made offering DMN modeling and execution capabilities as a service.  The DMN Modeler is a complete modeling environment for DMN, including collaboration, simulation, test cases, searching, etc. After creating a DMN model, he showed various ways of creating a new DMN Decision Service to expose.

Next, this can be deployed into the cloud (including using our own Drools or Red Hat Decision Manager DMN engine).  Once deployed, it can be tested with a simple HTML form, it has a rest API, debugging the environment allows you to look at the requests that were actually made, etc.  Using an API mgmt tool, you can add even more features like authorization.

Finally, it's of course possible to include these decision services into your processes.

Timing the Stock Market with DMN

Bruce Silver - methodandstyle.com

Bruce implemented a DMN model for predicting when to buy and sell stocks.  Based on historical stock data, it uses a DMN model to detect patterns (based on local min and max, smoothing, etc.) and   This service is then orchestrated by using a process (using Microsoft Flow) to go and download 1 year of data for specific stocks, process it and present the results - using various connectors (to get information from and into Excel, call the REST decision service, etc.).  His goal was to show how a non-programmer like himself can use DMN to do real life use cases that can then be fully executed. And you should buy his DMN Cookbook for all the details :)

Smarter Contracts with DMN

Edson Tirelli - Red Hat

One of the challenges of using Blockchain for smart contracts is that some of the languages used there (for example in Ethereum) isn't always easy to understand or use (especially for non-experts).  The goal Edson had upfront was trying to use DMN instead, as a language for smart contracts that users can understand.  Using an example of selling a property, he showed how some of the logic was externalized from the contract into a DMN decision service.  The contract raised an event, that the Ethereum Oracle picks up and contacts the DMN service (running in the cloud).  Using a simple web app to initialize and finalize the sale, you could see the Blockchain being updated with all the relevant data.

Pretty cool, although as Edson is my colleague I am obviously biased ;)

Designing the Data-Driven Company
Jochen Seemann - MID GmbH


The Business Decision Map is a way to represent decisions at different levels: tactical decision, operational decisions and business events. Using the example of a car rental company, it allows you to represent the decisions they need to make at the different levels.  Using the MID Innovator tool, these decisions can be represented using DMN.  But other options like PMML and Machine learning can also be combined.

Using Customer Journeys to Connect Theory with Reality
Till Reiter and Enrico Teterra - Signavio

Since the focus of any company should be on the customer, Signavio developed a new notation for presenting customer journeys and link those to processes and business intelligence.  Using the example of a communication company where a customer has a connectivity issue, they showed an end-to-end example.  The customer (with different moods) is going through various steps, and traffic lights link these to actual data collected at runtime, or to the business process involved.  Drilling into the data, it became apparent that a process improvement to reduce the number of field visits would be worth the effort, and everything was linked to the data to substantiate that claim.

Discovering the Organizational DNA
Jude Chagas Pereira, IYCON
Frank Kowalkowski, Knowledge Consultants, Inc.

Afterspyre offers various kind of analytics to help organizations make the right decisions.   By modeling your organizational DNA (like objectives, technology solutions, datacenters, etc.), the tool can then find any relationships between all these (for example which datacenter is running which objectives).  Other options include sentiment analysis (based on feedback from customers), affinity matrices (checking how well different thinks go together), ranking (comparing different options with each other), etc.

bpmNEXT 2018 kicking off !

Part of a series of blog posts about bpmNEXT 2018:
bpmNEXT 2018 kicking off!
bpmNEXT 2018 day 1 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2
bpmNEXT 2018 day 2 (part 2)
bpmNEXT 2018 day 3 

Attending bpmNEXT event again this year in Santa Barbara.  Have been looking forward to this event for quite a few months, so happy to be able to join again this year.  Will try to blog about my impressions.  My presentation itself will be on day 3!

Welcome and Business of BPM Kickoff

Bruce Silver

Bruce started with a kickoff and introduction, explaining why bpmNEXT is different from other BPM events out there (on purpose!), trying to bring together some of the best and brightest people leading BPM efforts across the globe.  And he's right (at least in my opinion), bpmNEXT is different, which is why I enjoy returning to it every year.

The Future of Process in Digital Business

Jim Sinur - Aragan Research

Jim is pitching how process is now part of a much bigger 'digital' shift.  The focus is on the customer journey (or employee or partner journey), to make everything smarter, faster and better - hopefully resulting in new business opportunities, better customer loyalty, agility, etc.  A lot of different technologies (including BPM and DMN of course but also AI, chatbots, self service, etc.) are all converging towards the same goals.  Rather than just data, the focus is moving more to intelligence.  And rather than doing it all at once, he presented 10 mini journeys that can get you closer one step at a time, focused on one specific area they have seen customers have success in (content, collaboration, process, persona, customer interaction, analytics, AI, agile, low code and business functions).  He zoomed in on areas like the decision management framework and customer journey mapping.  But processes are still at the center of IT innovation, although they are driven by much more, including AI, wearables, etc.

A new architecture for automation

Neil Ward-Dutton - mwd advisors

Neil is trying to summarize for us a lot of the discussions he's been having with their community related to automation.  There is an abundance in technology (all playing a part in automation), resources (with cloud), competitors, etc. generating lots of expectation (and investigation) but also fear, chaos and disruption.  Customers need a way to organize this tsunami of technologies.

Neil introduced a model for representing how work gets done.  Customers need to think about how this applies to them, ranging from very programmatic (P) (like straight-through processes), transactional (T) to very exploratory (E) work (like case mgmt).  Depending on your focus, different technologies (AI, Decision Mgmt, Machine Learning, RPA, etc.) might be playing a role in that.  With a rapid moving technology market, customers might end up with a combination of a lot of those.

After these introductory talks, the ignite presentations are kicking off.

Secure, Private, Decentralized Business Processes for Blockchains

Vanessa Bridge - ConsenSys

Consensys is using BPMN in combination with Blockchain.  By using processes to interact with the Blockchain, it simplifies how to work with smart contracts and takes advantage of some of the process capabilities (e.g. timers) for some of the logic.  They are presenting two use cases: a token sale and anonymous voting.  

Whenever a request for buying tokens comes in, the process is responsible for creating the smart contract (encrypting some of the information), checking the funds available and passing along the tokens, etc.

The voting system allows you to put in some information about the vote itself and who should participate.  Again a smart contract is created and allows participants to register and do their vote (again encrypting).

Turn IoT Technology into Operational Capability

Pieter van Schalkwyk - XMPro

IoT devices produce a lot of data, but how to create the glue that connects this data into your operational decisions?  By creating data flows (in this case from a cooling tower for example), you can combine data from different listeners, transform it, and take actions (using a library of extensible components).  Active listeners will be looking for the relevant data from the IoT devices and can then for example end up triggering a BPM tool, call an AI predictive service running in the cloud, etc.  Doing so can transform your Internet of Things into an Internet of People, helping the people making the operational decisions as much as possible.

Business Milestones as Configuration: Process Director App Events

Scott Menter - BPLogix

One of the challenges executing processes is how to easily get an idea of its status, one that makes sense at the business level. (Low-level) app events (coming from your processes) are given business context (making them business events) and used and combined to keep track of business goals.  A journal is then collecting these business events and can be inspected by business users, reacted on, etc.

 

More coming after lunch.

Watch Drools, jBPM and Optaplanner Day LIVE (Sept 26)

We will be streaming all the sessions of the Drools, jBPM and Optaplanner day in New York on September 26th 2017 LIVE !  Check the full agenda here.

Use the following link to watch: http://red.ht/2wuOgi1

Or watch it here:


Part 2:

Drools, jBPM and Optaplanner Day: September 26 / 28, 2017 (NY / Washington)

Red Hat is organizing a Drools, jBPM and Optaplanner Day in New York and Washington later this year to show how business experts and citizen developers can use business processes, decisions and other models to develop modern business applications.

• September 26, 2017 in New York
• September 28, 2017 in Washington DC

This free full day event will focus on some key aspects and several of the community experts will be there to showcase some of the more recent enhancements, for example:

• Using the DMN standard (Decision Model and Notation) to define and execute decisions
• Moving from traditional business processes to more flexible and dynamic case management
• The rise of cloud for modeling, execution and monitoring

IT executives, architects, software developers, and business analysts who want to learn about the latest open source, low-code application development technologies.

Detailed agenda and list of speakers can be found on each of the event pages.

Places are limited, so make sure to register asap !

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.

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!!!

Partner Workshops in Madrid and London in October

Red Hat is organizing two 3-day workshop for partners about various technologies, including JBoss BPM Suite, FSW and xPaas.  Both will take place in the next few weeks, one in Madrid and one in London, and I'll be attending both.

Important: this event is for Red Hat Channel Partners***, not end users or customers. 

Come spend three days with Red Hat experts and learn about JBoss BPM Suite, Fuse Service Works, and OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. This three-day master class will include product presentations, roadmaps, industrial use cases, panel discussions, and hands-on lab sessions, as well as the opportunity to talk one-on-one with the experts.

The speakers of the events are: middleware product leaders, principal architects and partner enablement experts. Many of them work as commiters in many open source communities. This is a great chance to meet the worldwide experts!

Madrid:  Tuesday, Oct 21 - Thursday Oct 23 2014

London: Monday, Oct 27 - Wednesday, Oct 29 2014

This is pretty last minute, but if you're interested and (would like to) qualify as Red Hat Partner, ask for an invitation from emea-partner-team@redhat.com

*** Red Hat Partners create an eco-system where they are building solutions or offering services based on existing Red Hat products.  For example, they might be delivering service projects or IT product as ISV partners, or delivering solutions based on Red Hat products as system integrators.  For more info, check out http://www.redhat.com/en/partners

London Community Event (May 26th - 30th)

During next week a large percentage of the Drools team, some of the jBPM team and some community members will be meeting in London (Chiswick). There won’t be any presentations, we’ll just be in a room hacking, designing, exchanging ideas and planing. This is open to community members who wish to contribute towards Drools or jBPM, and want help with those contributions. This also includes people working on open source or academic projects that utilise Drools or jBPM. Email Mark (mproctor at codehaus d0t org) if you want to attend, our locations may very (but within chiswick) each day.

We will not be able to make the day time available to people looking for general Drools or jBPM guidance (unless you want to buy us all lunch ;)). But we will be organising evenings things (like bowling) and could make Wed or Thu evening open to people wanting general chats and advice. Email Mark if you’re interested, and after discussing with the team, we’ll let you know.

Those currently attending:
Mark Proctor (mon-fri) Group architect
Edson Tirelli (mon-fri) Drools backend, and project lead
Mario Fusco (mon-fri) Drools backend
Davide Sottara (wed-fri) Drools backend
Alex Porcelli (mon-fri) Drools UI
Michael Anstis (thu-fri) Drools UI
Kris Verlaenen (wed-thu) jBPM project lead
Mauricio Salatino (mon-fri) jBPM tasks and general UI
Jeremy Lindop (wed-thu) jBPM designer (new hire)