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 ! :)

bpmNEXT and Red Hat Summit

We have a lot of interesting things in the works with Drools, jBPM and Optaplanner and we are going to show you! And what better opportunity to take a look under the hood at what is coming than joining us on a session, side talk or over a happy hour in the upcoming conferences?

Here is a short list of the sessions we have on two great conferences this month.  First of all, on bpmNEXT Edson will talk about DMN support and I will give a talk on unstructured cases.  

Red Hat Summit is 2 weeks later and there will be a larger number of presentations around BPM (and a lot more of course)! We hope to meet you there!

Oh, and check the bottom of this post for a discount code for the Red Hat Summit registration!

Santa Barbara, California April 18-20, 2017

• April 19th, 09:00: An Executable DMN Solution for Business Users - Bruce Silver and Edson Tirelli

• April 20th, 09:30: Supporting Unstructured Work - Kris Verlaenen

• May 2nd, 10:15: Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite Primer: Capabilities, Vision and Roadmap - Mark Proctor, Phil Simpson, Prakash Aradhya

• May 2nd, 11:30: It’s all about the process: How Red Hat IT is using JBoss BPM Suite - Kris Verlaenen, Michael Cirioli and Maciej Swiderski

• May 2nd, 15:30: Decision Model and Notation (DMN) 101 - Edson Tirelli and Denis Gagné

• May 2nd, 15:30: Show me the money! Optimize your business with JBoss BRMS Business Resource Planner - Geoffrey De Smet and Duncan Doyle

• May 3rd, 10:15: Preview BPM Suite 7 And meet the brains behind it - Roger Palleja and Mark Proctor

• May 3rd, 15:30: Advanced Drools - Mark Proctor and Mario Fusco

• May 3rd, 15:30: End to End BPM: From process modeling to execution with Signavio and Red Hat - Duncan Doyle and Tom Debevoise

• May 3rd, 16:30: Deep dive on case management - Kris Verlaenen and Maciej Swiderski

• May 4th, 10:15: Case management applications with BPM - Kris Verlaenen, Andrew Bonham and Michelle Kelo

• May 4th, 15:30: Decisions at a fast pace: scaling to multi-million transactions/second at Amadeus - Tarek Zaigouche, Edson Tirelli, Gabriel Bechara and Matteo Casalino

• May 4th, 15:30: Dawn of the Citizen Developer: Low Code Application Development Made Easy in BPMS/BRMS 7 - Alexandre Porcelli and Mark Proctor

bpmNEXT recording on case management

The recordings from the bpmNEXT 2016 conference (which I blogged about here) are available (for quite some time already it seems, I must have missed it somehow), but wanted to share the video of the presentation I did related to case management. 

It's a topic we are asked about regularly, and this presentation + demo might give you a good idea of where we are going:

Since then, we've made good progress, if you want to know more, take for example a look at the blog series by Maciej about case management as well.

jBPM 6.5.0.Final available

While we have been working on jBPM v7 for quite a while now, we still wanted to deliver a few more features that were requested by users.

You can find all information here:

Downloads

Documentation

Release notes

Ready to give it a try but not sure how to start?  Take a look at the jbpm-installer chapter.

So on top of a bunch of bug fixes, you can expect the following new features:

Core Engine

Process instance migration

Process instance migration allows you to upgrade an already active process instance to a newer version of the process definition (than the one it was started with). Optionally it allows to perform node mapping of active node instances within process instance (to accommodate for use cases where currently active nodes might have changed).  The jBPM services have been extended with a new more powerful API and the same functionality is available remotely through the kie-server API.

JMS interaction patterns

When using the remote API of our kie-server, the JMS version now also supports different interaction patterns (on top of the request-response already supported):

• fire and forget
• asynchronous with callback

Task variables support in listeners

Added operations to easily get access to task variables from within task listeners.

Remote API improvements for deployments

Additional operations have been added to the remote API to simplify integration: operations to get deployment information of your projects based on their group, id and/or version (GAV).


Process Designer

Improved automation importing service tasks in Designer

You can import custom service tasks from a service repository into Designer so they can be used in your process, like for example Twitter, FTP, etc. The workbench now automates a lot of the additional configuration as well:

•     Installs the service configuration (wid) into the users Workbench project
•     Installs the service icon (defined in the service configuration)
•     Installs the service maven dependencies into the project POM
•     Installs the service default handler into the project Deployment Descriptor

Using start up parameters, you can also register a default service repositories and even install service tasks by default for new projects. More details are available in the documentation.

Copy/Paste

You can now also perform copy/paste operations across different processes.


Workbench

Using workbench and kie-server together

Various small improvements allow you to use the workbench together with (one or more) kie-server execution servers to manage your process instances and tasks (sharing the same underlying datasource). As a result, processes and task created on one of the execution servers can now be managed in the workbench UI as well.

The jbpm-installer is now configured out-of-the-box to have a managed kie-server deployed next to it where you can deploy your processes to as well.

Support for enums in data modeler
The data modeler now supports selecting enums as the type when defining the parameters of a data object.

Upgrades

Various components have been added / upgraded:

• Upgraded to WildFly 10
• Added support for EAP 7
• Upgraded to Spring 4

The jbpm-installer now uses WildFly 10.0.0.Final as the default. 

Enjoy !

London JBug: v7 Roadmap (November 22nd)

On November 22nd, we will be doing a JBug in London where we will be showing (live) what's on our roadmap for v7 for Drools, jBPM, Optaplanner etc.

This will include for example details on some of our key initiatives:

• Case Management
• The new Process Designer 
• Our new Rich Client Platform
• Improved Forms and Page building 
• Improved Advanced Decision Tables and new Decision Model Notation
• Fully integrated DashBuilder reporting 
• New OptaPlanner features & performance improvements 

If you're interested, please register here.
Apparently there will be beer and pizza as well :)

Other team members will try to set up similar JBugs in a location near you, so stay tuned for more info if you would like to have a sneak peak as well!

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)