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Process on Demand and Cloud Services
Adapted from Enterprise Cloud Computing (www.mkpress.com/ECC) Jim Sinur, my long-time colleague and Vice President at Gartner Research, recently blogged that it seems BPM is finally catching up with some of the core ideas Howard Smith and I proffered way back in 2002 in our book, Business Process Management: The Third Wave. Wow, that’s almost a decade ago (acentury ago in Internet time) since we wrote about the dynamic, on the fly capabilities enabled by “mobile” processes (remember pi calculus?). Jim writes that BPM is now shifting focus from “Doing by Design” to “Design by Doing” in its efforts to reach the knowledge worker, support innovation, and provide better customer interactions, particularly over the mobile experience on the Web. Doing byDesign is the pre-planned definition of a predictable, routine process, as traditional BPM suggests. The BPM lifecycle covers modeling, deployment, analysis, and optimization. This all works if the processes are predictable, as are routine, mechanistic processes. Design by Doing is an approach that works when the process is not predictable, and can not be written down ahead of time. Since you cannot predict it, you have to elaborate it as you go along. This works for organic, unpredictable processes. The process design emerges from the doing. Jim writes, “As BPM picks up more ‘Design by Doing’ aspects, BPM will reach new audiences, such as knowledge workers at various levels in the organization. Gartner is calling this kind of BPM ‘Social BPM’ as discovery and enablement of interactionsbecomes more important and prevalent.” “In processes that are purely collaborative and dynamic, the process goes where it wants, guided by knowledge workers as long as it stays within constraints (special kind of policies and rules) and stays ‘on point’ to the desired KPIs. Afterwards, the process paths, collaborations, and collisions with constraints can be tracked in automated ways to discoverrepeatable success patterns, better practices, and worst practices. This, in turn, will give knowledge workers information on patterns that are successful, leveraging creative collaboration with individuals within an organization, and within a multi-company value chain. This kind of discovery is what I call ‘Design by Doing,’ aided by automated process discovery technologies and social BPM that canoffer alternatives and additional knowledge for high-level knowledge workers. “Some folks in the industry would call this ‘case management,’ but I think folks are trying to fit an older technology pattern to something new and emerging. Calling it ‘Adaptive Case Management’ is better, but it still falls short in describing where BPM is heading.” As I’ve written before at BPTrends and elsewhere, I’dgo one step beyond case management in
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describing the future of BPM and point to the term Human Interaction Management (http://tinyurl.com/3xjk9lh) powered by a Human Interaction Management (HIMS) that has mobile processes, speech acts, role activity theory, and multi-agent systems at its core (the solid underpinnings needed for bringing order to the chaos of unstructured communication): “TheGreatest Innovation Since BPM:” http://tinyurl.com/2frtkgc “On the Road to Tacit Interaction Support:” http://tinyurl.com/2fkurrx “Work 2.0: The Future of Work:” http://tinyurl.com/28oa9fl Process on Demand So, let’s bring all this back to the current state of BPM that Jim talks about, and shed some light on the relationship between BPM and cloud computing. While I’ve written before on the BPMSand Human Interaction Management, I’d like to focus now on the term Jon Pyke of the WfMC coined as “Process on Demand.” Without BPM, the Cloud remains a passive environment. However, we need to be very clear; process management in the Cloud is not just about BPM Suites on demand. The term “BPM on Demand” is beginning to take on a new meaning when used in conjunction with cloud computing. The...