By Jonathan Crow

Next on the agenda for Intalio JapanCon 2008 is the keynote address from Henry Peyret, the Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. His presentation introduced “BPM Trends for Intalio.”

Has worked on BPM for ten years now, started out with EAI, connectors, BAM, ESBs. Henry started out as any good analyst would with numbers showing how BPM is becoming mainstream. The goal now is to not only make it mainstream, but to make it successful.

Market Trends
Business drivers:

• Uncertainty requires agility
• End-to-end process optimization, across silos
• not only about productivity improvements
• Globalization - a single process for everyone
• localization - managing variants

According to customers, the most important benefit is increased productivity. But the most important element for Henry is the ability to change processes quickly and easily. This is becoming key for IT because of the changing regulations, changing requirement, changing business environment.

A BPM Center of Excellence is necessary for results. It is a key factor for success not only for measurement but for implementation. There is a strong correlation with a COE and goals being met. Metrics measured right now, productivity, quality, risk, compliance. Need to include measurements for agility as well.

The answer to what type of BPM project is most underway is modeling. They start with modeling and move on, but the maturity is not quite as far along with other BPM projects. The next level of maturity is execution, and the higher levels are process monitoring and optimization. Most customers have dones some sort of execution but have not yet gone further.

Customers need to correlate and monitor internal and external data. If a company is growing 20% which is a good number for that company, but the industry is growing at 40%, there is a better understanding of how well the company is really doing. Instead of just Key Performance Indicators, which should be called Key Productivity Indicators, we should add Key Quality, Agility, and Risk Indicators (KQI, KAI, and KRI). The goal is to recognize that each of these is supplied by different groups - suppliers, employees, outsourcers, IT systems, partners. For contract monitoring each resource involved should inherit global objectives. Contract monitoring is becoming a key area for BPM in the near future.

Software-as-a-Service, it will be important to externalize these processes to partners, across different types of repositories an important aspect of contract monitoring. Choose the right level of BPP that is not too simple but not too complex.

What is next
Dynamic Business Apps. We build applications that are agile, flexible, able to change. Characteristics:

• user-centric
• process-oriented
• flexible
• collaborative
• context-driven
• dynamic - can change in business time without programmers
• information-rich

Telco’s originally took 2 years to deliver applications on their platforms. The next generations took 4 months, then 1 month. Now with the fourth generation it takes one week. That is the type of dynamic bussiness application development process that needs to occur now. These apps will represent a fraction of the IT portfolio but will be the most strategic. These Dynamic Business Apps need to be tested.

Recommendations:

• Bring a BPMS center of excellence to your organization
• BPMS is a good candidate for Dynamic Business Apps
• Continue to watch the most innovative BPMS providing competitive advantages

Other blog articles in this series:

• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Introducing BPP
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Henry Peyret - Forrester
  
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: BAM Presentation
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Liferay Portal
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Intalio Server Overview

October 5th, 2008