by: Nicola Myers - July 2010
Gartner, the world’s leading IT research and advisory company, has created a report on the emerging trends in BPM for 2010 and beyond. The report describes how BPM will expand past traditional boundaries.
The overriding trend contained in the report is described by Janelle Hill, research vice president of Gartner. She states that “New BPM technologies will enable the management of unstructured and dynamic processes to deliver greater knowledge worker productivity and competitive advantage.”
Other trends include the convergence of technology. Agility of BPM technologies will increase due to maturing technologies (social software, mobile applications and discovery software) being joined with BPM suites. This makes them more user-friendly and relevant. Gartner suggests that end users explore new vendors whose systems self-adjust based on consumer demand, user preferences and predictive capabilities.
A third trend mentioned in the report was that organizations will be forced to adopt more dynamic BPM technologies. This will reduce the amount of time it takes to upgrade and update BPMs with market demand information which, in turn, results in faster responses and more efficient changes. These changes need to be made to both the processes implemented and software that governs them. The report warns that to avoid chaos these changes need to be coordinated.
The fourth trend described is that companies will focus on placing components into software they already have instead of writing new code or developing new software. This allows technology and infrastructure to support the much needed adaptability of processes. The composition will threaten packaged application vendors while well designed components will become a factor in the success of process-based SOA and organizational specific compositions will become recurrent. Gartner suggests that companies think about projects in a new light with focus on collaboration between technical and business roles.
The report states a fifth trend which entails the use of business process networks (BPNs) in more multi-enterprise integration projects. Some companies will use traditional horizontal-integration solutions but most will explore pre-bundled solutions like BPNs which have prebuilt translation packages.
The last trend mentioned in the Gartner report is that of graphic modeling growth from 6% of companies using graphic modeling in 2009 to 40% in 2014. The use of graphical modeling will become commonplace in business and IT roles.
A Procentrica expert, Thomas Prinsloo, agrees with the findings of the Gartner report. He would also like to emphasize the cloud trends in BPM as “though it seems like a slow starter, I feel it will eventually take off properly where high-speed bandwidth is not a luxury.” The example he gives is the Metastorm’s M3 CloudApp which was launched at the Metastorm conference. This combines a collaborative online modeling environment with a Smart Business Workspace. The Workspace allows widgets to be added for navigability and customization and so leveraging the BPM idea.
Even though these may sound like crystal ball prophecies, we will soon see if they will come to pass.
