What follows is my podcast with Dr. Michael Rowley, the Director of Technology and Strategy for Active Endpoints. Michael is involved in the design and architecture of Active VOS. In this podcast we discuss BPM: its definition, its deployment, BPMS and standards, and it's future. Definitely worth a listen below.
Listen to or download the 6:50 minute podcast below:
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PS: Now, everyone seems to agree that BPM is the solution that can really help companies survive in these tough times. But on the other side, everybody seems to disagree on the exact definition of BPM. What's your definition?
MR: Yes, they do indeed. There are a variety of definitions but they have some things in common but the variety expands from people who are talking about BPM as primarily a modeling technology for understanding what a business is doing. On the other end of the scale, is BPM with more of an emphasis on management for the "M" where you're trying to write a new application but you want the new application to align well with what the business is doing and to be able to see and understand the business while looking at the application.
So we tend not to come from just a modeling perspective, we come from a perspective where modeling is important but you don't want to just understand your business, you want to create applications that involve both services as well as people and have that application follow what you consider the important processes of your business. And then, if a process from your business changes, the application itself can change very easily and dynamically.
And then also, another key characteristic of, I think, everybody's view of BPM is that if you build applications this way, not only do you have higher productivity way of developing the application to begin with because you're drawing something that looks like the controlled flow of your business. but also, when you look at it at runtime, you get a view into what's actually happening in your business in terms that both the technical person can understand as well as more of a business person can understand.
That makes a lot of sense. Now, it seems that a lot of BPM experts have concluded that to do an effective BPM they need to go around IT to implement processes. Now, why would you say that is and does it actually work?
I think it's really unfortunate when people do that. And the problem I think is that sometimes it does work a little bit at first that you can start using a tool with kind of an end user at the edge who's taking activities and doing an initial cut at an application that involves people and maybe some services. But if you don't get an IT involved, you're generally not going to get all of the exceptional cases handled where the person that you care about isn't around.
The service that you wanted to call is down but there's another one that's available, or it starts becoming successful and it needs to scale up, or it's been going for a while and you need to archive things. There's just any number of technical problems that are associated with a successful application. And if you go around IT, you are hurt by success. If it fails, and nobody really uses it much, then you don't notice that you blew it. But when you include IT, then you can get both the business person involved in what ought to exist as well as the IT involved in making it really enterprise ready and deal with the enterprise capabilities that will be necessary for the thing to become successful, gain in size and live over a long period of time.
That's good to know. Now, what does it matter if BPMS is standard based?
That's a great question. I think there are two key reasons. One is investment protection and the other one is the skills base of your potential workers. For investment protection, you don't want to have a lot of your knowledge around your business process and the key logic of your business processes invested in a technology that is tied to a single vendor because then you're stuck. If that vendor goes in the wrong direction or treats you badly, there's really nothing you can do because you've invested so much into this technology.
The other one, this skills base, is that BPM is a really a new and growing field and this field needs technologies that are standardized so that people, even in school, and whether its business school, or in technology like computer science can learn this and you can have a whole base of technologist and business people who have a common understanding of the technology and only then will this really be able to grow to be a new way of doing business.
What do you see for the future of BPM?
I see that the maturing of the standards and the maturing of the tools that execute these standards is going to really make this a viable way of people running their businesses. Right now, I would say that BPM is growing at leaps and bounds but it's only the beginning. The number of businesses and the number of applications that are using BPM right now is still a tiny fraction of what it could be. And that people will see the maturity of this technology, they will learn the technology and it will grow incredibly in the next several years and the standards like BPMN and BPEL in growing together will provide an environment that people can really be effective with, produce new applications at a very fast clip, and provide information to the business end user that allows them to see, understand, and modify their processes as they need to.
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