What Developments in BPM Are You Most Thankful For This Year?

We are thankful for simplicity above the covers, and complexity under the covers.

Without simplicity, you wouldn't get the business to take responsibility for well-defined processes. But without IT complexity to manage beneath the surface of BPM, I dare say many of us on this board would be out of a job! Cheers to you all and goodbye to the harsh 00s.

The fact that the market has recognized that all process are not equal. Strutured, ad-hoc, and dynamic processes all exist and enabling them requires more than just a process studio.

I'm thankful that after much work by many people the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications have gone into public review. These are important new specifications in the BPM space and the OASIS TC that worked on them did a great job.

I am thankful for seeing the BPM market starting to mature. With the recognition of the truly important players at the enterprise level visible in the acquisitions and success of certain companies this year, customers can start to rely on the software they are buying being around for more than another 18 months.

On a personal note, for the small/mid-sized companies, I am thankful to have the opportunity to give them a taster of what BPM can offer, without the hefty price-tag.

I will be the grinch and take the controversial stand that there were no developments inside the BPM industry that really stand out. It was more of the same; nothing truly exciting. There was nothing that changed the dynamics in a signficant way that would benefit customers or take the industry to a different level. It seems to me that developments outside the BPM industry will have a much more far reaching impact, and BPM vendors react to these changes. In these I include the rapid growth of SaaS, rich client technologies such as Silverlight, Flex, HTML5, the introduction of Google Wave, Cloud Computing and technologies that allow systems in the cloud to interoperate with information inside the firewall. These technogies are what will drive large number of customers to BPM in the years to come. And I should also add the emergence of smartphones as a business application platform to the list.

Given where 2009 started, I’m mainly thankful we still have a thriving – indeed, fast growing – BPM market. BPM has traditionally got much of its business from Financial Services, and it seems that the message re key benefits – improved productivity, SLA compliance and MIS – has continued to be attractive through 2009 despite/because of the GFC and looks set to be the driver for a surge of investment in 2010.

On the technical front – IBM buying Lombardi, also making progress on bringing its mashup and BPM technologies together; Oracle integrating with ARIS in 11g; BPMN 2.0 making good progress in the OMG; practically everyone acknowledging that rules engines have a role in BPM (still some work needed on exactly what/how!); and there are still folk out there prepared to stretch our brains with discussion of goal-orientated BPM and complex event/BPM convergence.

And thankful that there are still so many good folk so passionate about BPM!

well, one of the biggest developments in BPM to be thankful for is bringing the business perspective back into IT spending. With such ROIs that are hard to ignore, BPM has shown organizations not just how to look beyond using software merely to achieve automation of transactions, but to go further to unlock hidden potential of process performance.

And although that may not actually be something that happend this year, it certaily was something that became so emphatic that it actually got many organizations spend on BPM to get competitive - a year when fists were clenched tightest around budgets. And thats no ordinary feat.

Outstandingly, it is PaaS. Also Collaboration (a.k.a myBPM) made significant in roads into BPM in the form of Web 2.0. I like SAP's Gravity implemented using Google Wave as the primary example of Collaborative BPM.