Gartner has published a Press Release containing a list of “Five Business Process Management Predictions for 2010 and Beyond”. These include:

• By 2012, 20 per cent of customer-facing processes will be knowledge-adaptable and assembled just in time to meet the demands and preferences of each customer, assisted by BPM technologies.
• By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.

Possibly I am being dim here, but I just can’t see how to map “knowledge-adaptable” and “just-in-time” onto the current process orchestration diagramming (e.g. via BPMN) that is de rigeur in “BPM technology” circa 2010. For sure, TIBCO has BPM customers doing adaptable, event-driven, dynamic processes - but these are also using technologies like goal-driven BPM and state-driven rule-based CEP, assembling or re-using (BPMN or state model) process fragments on the fly. So Gartner reckons that 20% of BPM applications - OK, they let’s assume they mean 20% of new BPM projects - are going to be using such techniques in 2012? Well, they could be right… but its going to need tomorrow’s BPM3.0….

Other predictions were:

• Through 2014, the act of composition will be a stronger opportunity to deliver value from software than the act of development.
• By 2014, business process networks (BPNs) will underpin 35 per cent of new multienterprise integration projects.
• By 2014, 40 per cent of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 enterprises will use comprehensive business process models to support their daily work, up from 6 per cent in 2009.

I can’t really comment on these - composition of business processes is a heavily constrained activity that requires a lot of knowledge of the state of the process and associated cases. As for “business process networks”, Gartner means these are preconfigured solutions or BAM applications - which again are extremely context (state) sensitive. As for use of business processes - well I’m sure many people use processes that started off as a process model today - every time you fill in a time card, log a customer visit, etc… but do you use process models? And how many of those models will be dynamic, rule-driven etc?

• About Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2010…

These predictions also happened to publicise the Gartner BPM events in the USA and Europe in March 2010… attendees can stop by the TIBCO booth for more info on TIBCO BPM+ … including CEP.

Just reading Sandy Kemsley’s reporting on the Gartner BPM conference and in particular Jim Sinur on “dynamic BPM”. From the TIBCO perspective we definitely see “CEP” overlap with “BPM” here - mostly around business automation rather than workflow / general process modeling, although of course workflow events can be complex events too.

Sandy comments: A significant part of [dynamic BPM] is the inclusion of explicit rules within processes, so that scenario-driven rule sets can detect and respond to conditions, even without the process participants having to make those changes themselves… What used to be monolithic lumps of code can be split into several parts, each of which has the potential to be agile.

Reflecting on this, based on experience (i.e. customer production use cases with TIBCO BusinessEvents…)

1. “Rules within processes” can be achieved though “processes defined as rules” (as well as the more usual practice of forcing the business analyst to separate process and rules via different tooling). Of course, “rules” (e.g. business decisions, event and process rules, etc)  can be themselves be represented in multiple ways: we find the UML State Model (for entity lifecycle modeling) very useful for defining processes and as a (state transition) rule representation.
   
2. “Monolithic lumps of code” could be interpreted as “monolithic process diagrams” in a BPM context. The real benefit comes from the model-driven approach: combining multiple models to provide agility and flexibility at the level (business or IT) required. The important thing here is that “one model to rule them all” (e.g. BPMN) doesn’t work …. yet.
   

TIBCO implements dynamic BPM in a number of ways, though:

• control workflows via event processing (event-driven BPM)
• separate processes into automated / dynamic (via event processing - event-based BPA) and manual / workflow (via BPM)
• Etc.