iBPMS - Intelligent BPM Systems (Print)

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• Quality Paperback: 220 pages
• ISBN-13: 978-0984976461

Foreword by Jim Sinur, Gartner Emeritus

Intelligent business process management is the next generation of enterprise BPM, leveraging recent technological advances to attain a degree of operational responsiveness not possible with yesterday’s business process platform.

Today, companies of all types want faster and better insight into their operations. This growing demand for operational intelligence has given rise to a new, "smarter" variety of business process management suites (BPMSs).

An intelligent BPM suite provides the functionality needed to support more intelligent business operations, including real-time analytics, extensive complex event processing (CEP) and business activity monitoring (BAM) technologies and enhanced mobile, social and collaborative capabilities.

Dubbed ‘iBPMS” by Gartner Group, who describes the intelligent BPM Suite as having 10 core components:

• A process orchestration engine
• A model-driven composition environment
• Content interaction management
• Human interaction management
• Connectivity
• Active analytics (sometimes called continuous intelligence)
• On-demand analytics
• Business rules management (BRM)
• Management and administration for the suite’s technical aspects
• A process component registry/repository

An intelligent BPM suite provides the functionality needed to support more intelligent business operations, including real-time analytics, extensive complex event processing (CEP) and business activity monitoring (BAM) technologies and enhanced mobile, social and collaborative capabilities.

The co-authors of this important book describe various aspects and approaches with regard to impact and opportunity.

Thriving on Adaptability: How Smart Companies Win in a Data-Driven World.

Nathaniel Palmer, Business Process Management, Inc. (BPMI) and WfMC

Whatever business you are in today, inevitably you face an environment defined by growing uncertainty and unpredictability, where advantage favors not the best plans but the speed of change. Yet in the face of constant change, competitive advantage is derived not simply from the flexibility to move with the tide, but rather from having the intelligence to interpret the signals that indicate where the tide is headed, and the capability to proactively move in that direction. In this way, we see the much-lauded trait of “agility” (defined generally as “the ability to change”) as being necessary yet insufficient. Rather it is “adaptability” which enables sustainable competitive advantage – the ability to not only do new things well, but also identify what to do and how to do it.

Avoiding Fragility in Innovative Learning Organizations

Keith Swenson, Fujitsu America Inc.

Do you conceptualize your organization as a machine? If so, you may be led down the wrong path for optimizing business processes. Machines are complicated, but truly complex systems, like an organization, a marketplace, an ecosystem, are not like machines. Evidence for this is both familiar and surprising. It is the “Enlightenment Bias” which blinds us to the true nature of organizations. If you want your organization to excel, you need to understanding the true nature of organizations, and the new generation of tools that are becoming available to support them.

Adaptive Case Management for Railway Freight Operations

Helle Frisak Sem, Steinar Carlsen, Gunnar John Coll and Thomas Bech Pettersen, Computas AS, Norway

CargoNet AS is the primary Norwegian freight train operator, and GTS is their system for logistics-handling. GTS adaptively unifies contributions from knowledge workers across the organization, from marketing and sales to train configuration and composition, scheduling, real-time monitoring, handling of dangerous goods, truck operations and container quality assurance. It is an ACM system, multiplying as an ERP solution. GTS is a mission critical system used by most employees involved in the primary value chain, fully integrated with CargoNet's internet customer portal. Since going online in 2002, GTS has been gradually enhanced in terms of end-user functionality.
Showcasing a non-traditional application of case management technologies, the GTS architecture is information centric. A range of tasks and tools operate on shared work folder contents. The integrated customer portal for placing orders contributes to the contents of work folders. A ruggedized mobile client is deployed in cargo handling trucks, used for container reception, placement and depot management. Another mobile client handles container damage assessment.

Creating an Integrated Platform for Enterprise-wide Process Intelligence

Roy Altman, Peopleserv, Inc.

What does it take to make BPM strategic to the organization? BPM systems have traditionally focused tactically on individual processes. A platform integrating a range of BPM technologies is required to scale BPM to orchestrate processes and tasks across the entire extended enterprise, thus providing strategic value.
BPM technology is advancing rapidly, encompassing structured workflow, tools for the knowledge worker, mobile, social, and machine intelligence. We need to take an “all of the above” approach to leverage these technologies to assist with the dynamically changing nature of business. To accomplish this requires a platform that enables one to “plug in” technology components which can interact as an integrated whole, leveraging the tool that’s appropriate for each problem.
By taking this holistic approach and creating an end-to-end process platform, BPM can provide strategic value to the organization by allowing seamless use of various technologies to address business needs.
An intelligent BPM platform requires deep technical integration for the software components, as well as Relationship Management to provide functional integration for the interactions between people involved in the processes. Only through functional as well technical integrations can we provide a fully integrated environment to make full use of the powerful BPM technologies of the present and the future.

Process of Everything

Setrag Khoshafian and Don Schuerman, Pegasystems Inc.

Read Setrag's blog about the Process of Everything

The Internet of Everything will involve billions “things” or devices connected over the Internet: generating data, being controlled, and pro-active in innovations that will transform both individual lives as well as businesses.  These things or devices will be intelligent. Increasingly, the Internet of Things will extend beyond traditional electronic devices to include everything from food products to cars to the houses we live in. In the next decade, digital-enabled things will generate more Internet traffic than people. They will be the main source of Big Data – characterized by enormously large volume, velocity, and complexity. Through embedded intelligence, the things will be semi-autonomous agents.
Intelligent BPM will provide the context to coordinate these events. It will instantiate, complete, and resolve work created from these devices and serve as a bridge to connect these devices to human participants. It will mine the events in real-time. Intelligent devices will execute business rules and decisions. They will learn and adapt – while being “process” connected to other devices or humans.
This is a natural evolution of BPM: human participants in Intelligent Business Process Management solutions are already augmented with guided interactions and decisioning intelligence. When associated with “things,” the process automation extends from the confines of humans and includes intelligent devices over the Internet: The Process of Everything.

The iBPM Ecosystem: More Human than System

Gianpiero Bongallino, openwork

Similar to the human nervous system, the iBPM is a system that allows us:

• to process the inputs from external or internal systems (Events),
• to correlate them in order to obtain a more meaningful signal (CEP),
• to send the pre-processed impulses to the brain (Event Channel), which further processes them and triggers a reaction, according to pre-established patterns (BPM and business rules),
• to adapt them to different situations (ACM), according to the contingency and previous memory (BAM and Recommender System).

Each sub-system has unique characteristics and can adapt to different business needs in different domains, thus enabling it to solve complex problems, in real-time or even before the issue arises. A healthcare scenario will be also examined, illustrating how these technologies can be used in some phases of the management of a healthcare organization.

Marketing Intelligent BPM to Healthcare Intelligently

Charles Webster, EHR Workflow Inc.

Health information technology (HIT) professionals who learn about business process management (BPM) technology are usually impressed. Nonetheless, BPM has been slow to diffuse into healthcare. HIT has technologies corresponding to some BPM suite core components. But process orchestration engines remain rare. Fortunately, there are signs that the HIT market is en-tering a period of greater need and appreciation for BPM ideas, products, and services. I describe the current state of affairs within the health IT industry and suggest how BPM vendors can engage, educate, and communicate, about BPM’s unique value to healthcare and health IT.

How to Make Mobile BPM Robust and Intelligent

Dirk Draheim, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Theodorich Kopetzky, SCCH GmbH, Austria, Josef Küng, FAW GmbH, Austria

We represent a workflow management system that realizes a sweet spot between the robustness of a centralized master workflow enactment service and the flexibility of distributed disconnected workflow management services. The architecture emerged in a concrete scenario with the requirement that traveling business agents can continue to work with their supporting enterprise applications even if they are disconnected from the Internet and therefore disconnected from their enterprise IT infrastructure. Key characteristics of the solution are mobile and intelligent data and workflow state synchronization mechanisms. The system was implemented at the largest Austrian insurance company AUVA.  There is still no single systematic BPM suite available that handles the problem of disconnecting and reconnecting clients in a smart way. As we now from many discussions in CIO cycles, in practice only ad-hoc solutions based on ECM systems or public mail folders are used to deal at least with the data facet of the described problem. However, with these ad-hoc solutions a smart treatment of distributed workflow state is nigh on impossible. The presented system shows a way out of this dilemma.

Decision Support For Intelligent BPM

Pieter Van Schalkwyk, XMPro

This chapter covers the introduction of decision support for BPM to create Intelligent BPM. It describes the evolution on BPM from a machine economy to a knowledge economy where human capital is now the biggest asset. Business and processes rely on people's knowledge, experience and intuition to get much of the work in modern businesses done. Decision support can take many forms. It can be based on analytics where information is made available to processes in real time to create Operational Intelligence (and it is contrast with more strategic BI). It can be in the form of external data that help guide process decisions, like weather web-services that support logistics routing processes. It can be algorithmic decision trees that help guide the decision process.
Intelligent BPM without in-built decision support doesn't aid knowledge workers to drive process outcomes to KPIs or goals. Decision support is the GPS of Intelligent BPM.

Emerging Standards in Decision Modeling—an Introduction to Decision Model & Notation

James Taylor, Decision Management Solutions; Alan Fish, FICO; Jan Vanthienen, KU Leuven; Paul Vincent, TIBCO

Written by four members of the submission team (representing FICO, TIBCO, Decision Management Solutions and the University of Leuven), this paper introduces the Decision Model & Notation.
The BPM market has expanded and matured in recent years, driven in part by the growing acceptance and broad use of process standards and common modeling notations. As companies transition to intelligent BPM, however, there is a need to focus on decision-making as well as process execution and workflow. Decision-making is important in intelligent processes, making them simpler and more agile as well as increasing the rate of straight through processing. However existing standards and notations do not readily support the modeling and specification of decision making. To address this need a new standard is being developed at the OMG, the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard.

A Reliable Methodology for BPM Project Implementation

Josip Brumec and Slaven Brumec, KORIS d.o.o., Croatia

The methodology for the implementation of BPM project is presented as a set of mutually related activities performed by business experts, process designers and software engineers, and their collaboration while performing BPM projects. The roles of the participants are different: business experts must participate in As Is modeling, define the KPIs to measure the effects of BPR, estimate To Be models and prepare the company for implementation of improved business processes. Business process designers must define the optimal solutions for future business processes and to prove their performance that match predefined KPIs and define ICT infrastructure for BPM. Software engineers need to develop a process-oriented applications, test them and prepare for the implementation.
The methodology itself is defined as a business process model with more than 25 activities and sub-processes, arranged in three lanes. Procedures for each participant were determined by sequence flows, events and decisions, and collaboration among the participants is presented as information flows. The methodology is graphically presented in accordance with the BPMN 2.0 standard and the meaning of all steps and symbols is described in details.
The proposed methodology is practically validated through several implemented projects, and has also confirmed as an excellent manager’s tool to control the realization of BPM project.

Composing Services in the Future Internet: Choreography-Based Approach

Marco Autili, University of L’Aquila, Italy; Amira Ben Hamida, Linagora GSO, France; Guglielmo De Angelis, CNR-ISTI, Italy; Darius Silingas, No Magic Europe, Lithuania

In this chapter, we will discuss emerging technology that enables intelligent business processes enacting services based on choreography specifications. This technology was produced by CHOReOS research project funded under European research program FP7 (CHOReOS 2013).
Today service-based software engineering is heavily based on service orches-trations that can be specified in various formats, such as BPEL (OASIS 2007) or BPMN 2.0 (OMG 2011). Service orchestration is a centralized approach to composing multiple services into a larger application. It works well in static environments where services are predefined and environment changes are minimal. Alas, this is a wrong assumption for the Future Internet, which en-visions an ultra large number of diverse service providers and consumers that are impossible to coordinate using centralized manner.

Making SOA work—a Practice-Oriented Overview

Gerhard Rempp & Martin Löffler, MID GmbH, Germany

Services represent the pivotal feature of service-oriented architecture. This paper highlights how a service evolution can take place within a SOA service lifecycle, from the specialized process and defining business services all the way to technical service implementation.
SOA has often been declared a failure. But, in fact, we can see that SOA use has now become a reality! After all, those who have been declared dead often live the longest, and many prophets are later revealed to be naysayers.
There are active SOA projects in every large company, and “SOA-ification” is forging ahead. Still, there is no longer any huge hype surrounding it. And that’s a good sign! SOA and the associated standardization has become part of our everyday lives.
Still, there are some unresolved issues. The authors discuss why, in order to lay the right foundations for a successful SOA project, services need to be developed on the basis of specialized knowledge.

Smart Tools and Visual Analytics

Hartmann Genrich, Process Analytica, Germany; Robert Shapiro, Process Analytica, USA

Smart tools of PA Optima support fast optimization by simulation and analysis using only that subset of the analytics required by the particular optimization technique. They are rather ‘autistic’ and focus on efficiency rather than interaction and generality.
So far two such tools are available: Smart Resource Allocation and Smart Productivity Improvement. We briefly describe Smart Allocation because the optimization algorithms in it are also used in Smart Productivity. The Smart Productivity Improvement tool is novel and different from all other components of Optima. It goes one step beyond identifying potential improvement. It combines functionality of existing applications for cost/benefit and return-on-investment analysis with the Visual Analytics power of PA Optima; it facilitates the quick assessment of proposed improvement measures.