I was interested to read Prof Sheer's article on future trends in BPM but there were a number of trends that seemed to be missing. I'd be interested to know what you business process experts think about them and how Business Process Analysis methods and tools will support them in future.
- Complex Event Processing (CEP) - this is where multiple events are detected, filtered by business rules, and multiple possible outcomes are generated; usually as human alerts or process triggers
- Time series analysis - an input stream of events is analysed for time dependency e.g. when three related events happen within a specified time or an expected event does not occur within a timeframe
- Control processes - processes that monitor other processes and create events/alerts depending on business rules (in effect automating feedback from Business Activity Monitoring)
- Service processes - describing the processes that are triggered when a business service is invoked
- Colllaborative processes - processes involving multiple stakeholders in decision-making; often with the use of a shared knowledgebase
- Dynamic processes - processes where business rules alter depending on events (e.g. learning systems)
- Metadata integration between business rules and data sources
- BPM integration with Business Service Management (the next step from Configuration Management Database integration)
I'd be interested to know about progress in developing business process analysis and toolset support for these.
Hi Richard,
reading your list I got the feeling that you are doing a lot with business rules, because points 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7 are basically all referring to automating certain decisions using automated support. Personally, I'm not a big fan of complex event processing (CEP), because it seems to be just another IT hype for a topic done by many successfully for years.
Your points 4 and 8 aim at something I would call SOA governance (but not meaning governing some web services). We will need SOA governance as soon as service orientation gets more applied in industry. I have not yet seen that happening on a large scale, so let's wait and see what's happing there.
Point 5 is a hot topic too, asking how to use current consumer technologies such as Web 2.0 in business process management. But I think this point is discussed by Prof. Scheer in his article, too.
Regards,
Sebastian
Hi Richard,
you are right, complex event processing should be a hot trend in the process industry. But I recognized that most of the CEP usage is in the financial area focussing on single events . The monitoring of
BUSINESS processes is not often being done via CEP technologies. Its more focused on the fulfillment of isolated SLA's than on process KPI's. I guess one reason is that the aggregation of process KPI's is more difficult because you need to monitor a process with all its possible paths trough the organization. With the growth of SOA it might change because you will be able to monitor services which are part of processes.
Cheers
Joerg