I’ve been a little slow in blogging about what I learned at IBM IMPACT (#ibmimpact) this year… apologies if you’ve been waiting for pearls of wisdom from me! ;-) I blame a big client workload. Damn those clients.

So it’s a couple of weeks now since IMPACT (at least for me – I was only there for 48 hours) and the second day was when things got interesting. Whereas Day 1 ranged across a variety of topics – even featuring the unveiling of a PureApplication System box on stage (I can’t remember if dry ice was involved, but for the full ’80s effect there should certainly have been) – Day 2′s keynote focused exclusively on ‘Process Innovation’.

‘Process Innovation’ is shorthand for how IBM is pitching its portfolio of tools and capabilities related to BPM and Operational Decision Management (a unification of the WebSphere event processing and rules technologies). This past year IBM’s Phil Gilbert has been focused on further simplifying and integrating IBM’s portfolio here, and his keynote (and other sessions at IMPACT) showcased the work that’s been done – largely in v8 of Business Process Manager, but also in version 8 of WebSphere Operational Decision Management.

We’ll be publishing an updated in-depth assessment of IBM’s BPM technology offering before the end of June, so here I’ll just point out what I think are the main highlights.

In Business Process Manager v8:

• Simplified design tools. It’s now much easier to build more sophisticated ‘coaches’ (what IBM calls task user interfaces) that exhibit dynamic behaviours and include rich content, using much less hand coding.
• Better support for document management. Decent CMIS support means building processes where participants need to retrieve, manage and update documents requires much less work.
• Bringing more work context and assistance to participants. There are two key things here. First, in the context of completing a task, coaches are augmented with what I’ll call a ‘work context panel’ (not sure what the official name is, if there is one). As a participant is working on a task using a coach, Business Process Manager shows (a) the history of what’s happened prior to this task, and who’s worked on the process to this point; (b) recommends other participants who would be well-placed to assist in completion of the task; (c) enables a participant to collaborate in real time with another participant in completing the task (using real-time sharing functionality reused from Blueworks Live). Second, in the context of presenting processes and tasks to participants, in v8 the standard worklist UI metaphor is sidelined in favour of a metaphor based around rich search, filtering and lists (borrowing from popular social applications and also echoing Appian’s Tempo).
• Better support for large-scale efforts. It’s possible to federate content across multiple instances of the Process Center repository, and also possible to link Process Center instances with other enterprise repositories containing upstream and downstream assets (think requirements docs, architecture blueprints, test case definitions and so on) via OSLC support.
• Foundation for mobile process work. A published REST API for the BPM runtime environment makes it relatively straightforward to create custom native mobile applications for carrying out tasks in the context of processes.

In Operational Decision Management v8: borrowing UX and design-time concepts from Blueworks Live and BPM and going further. The Decision Center now comes with a business-facing Business Console that presents updates through an activity stream and faceted and free-text search, and a significantly more friendly rules editor. A Facebook-like ‘timeline view’ of rule versions is also provided to help people visualise change histories, which I suspect will also turn up in a future version of Business Process Manager too.

In Blueworks Live: the ability to model process decisions through in-place creation of decision tables, and the ability to model enterprise policies and relate them to processes.

So in summary: from a user perspective the industry-wide themes of mobile and social are writ large; it’s good to see IBM in particular thinking deeply about how social collaboration can be truly woven into work, rather than just bolted on. From a design-time perspective the main thrust is around simplification and integration, which is just as it should be.

Of course there’s room for improvement: the elephant in the room (it’s been there for a while, and is probably now sitting against a wall throwing a ball) is Case Manager. There’s some foundational integration points in place, but a clear roadmap would be very welcome. It’s also unclear to what extent IBM is interested in capturing more ‘upstream’ process improvement activity through process discovery and mining tools.

Still, IBM continues to show that overall it takes BPM very seriously, and it’s serious about taking a market-leading position as a technology provider.

If you take a look at Progress Software’s home page on the web today, you’ll see the following four things highlighted (along with a blog post from CTO John Bates):

• the launch of Responsive Process Management (RPM) 2.2
• the results of a ‘BPM smackdown’ analysis that placed Savvion in a leading spot
• a case study of Apria Healthcare, based on use of Savvion’s BPM technology
• another analysis showing Actional as a leader in its space.

With the new Progress strategy outlined in a press release today, all of those four things will go away.

Progress plans to divest its Actional, Artix, DataXtend, FuseSource, ObjectStore, Orbacus, Orbix, Savvion, Shadow and Sonic product lines. So – if we take this at face value (and that’s all I can do at this stage) that means no more technology to support customers looking to implement BPM, SOA, or MDM. Instead the company will renew its focus on its heritage OpenEdge and DataDirect businesses, as well as redouble its efforts to build and market a cloud-based application platform, and increase its focus on Apama in Capital Markets (you can find out the detail the press  release).

At this stage, I have to make some assumptions. But if Progress means what people normally mean when they say “divest”, I think these divestitures could place the new growth strategy – focused in significant part around OpenEdge – at significant risk. Why? Because part of what was starting to make OpenEdge interesting to the market again was the way in which Progress was expanding the scope of the development concerns that OpenEdge could address.

There are other concerns; not least, the release highlights “Apama Analytics” and talks in other places about Big Data and analytics capabilities; but these don’t exist in any real sense today (at least, not in the sense that most people would use those terms). An intimation is made that OpenEdge will be positioned as a platform for building massive scale web applications that leverage Big Data, but that’s a long way from what OpenEdge is really doing for anyone today.

According to the release Progress expects to divest all these products/businesses by the middle to the end of 2013 – which is, any way you look at it, quite a long time away in the world of sales. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the pipelines for all these products to dry up very soon indeed, as prospects focus instead on potential choices with clear futures. I hope that’s accounted for in the plan!

Now of course this is a quick reaction to a significant piece of news for any Progress customer or prospect. Of course I’ll be looking for more in-depth information as soon as I can get it – and if I learn anything which adds to this or contradicts it I’ll update you all. At the moment, though, it looks like Progress is set to do a 180 degree turn, and revisit its past to try and reinvent its future.

Let’s see how it turns out… and hope that some of the very decent technologies being punted here find good homes.

I’d love to get your thoughts and comments!

UPDATE 30/4/12:

I had a briefing with John Bates and Colleen Smith of Progress on 26 April, the day after I wrote the piece above, and I learned some additional detail that I wanted to share with you.

Firstly, Bates and Smith were very clear in saying that the company needs to find a space where it can be truly different for a profitable market segment, and use this to drive growth. It’s focusing on what it calls “Application Platform as a Service” (aPaaS) and at this point, its intention is to get to be the “number 1 provider of application development and deployment platforms in the Cloud”. The current enterprise IT middleware business (combining the business from Savvion, Actional, Sonic, et al) just isn’t providing enough of a growth engine for shareholders; and the company’s leadership also feels that Progress has struggled to focus sufficiently as it’s been fighting on a large number of fronts. By adding data connectivity (DataDirect), event processing (Apama), rules (Corticon) and visualisation (Control Tower) capabilities to the work it’s already done through Progress Arcade in making OpenEdge a foundation for a PaaS offering for ISVs wanting to transition to cloud delivery, Progress believes it can find that space. It’s also planning to add support for multiple development languages, further boost analytics, and create some explicit linkages to “Big Data” management technologies.

My take is that if Progress can execute on the plan it shared with me, then it could do something really interesting – particularly for small and medium sized application vendors. But I also think it’s got a hell of a task ahead of it to get all these additional products – all of which are built for on-premise installation – and re-engineer them sensibly for PaaS. What’s more, because things are moving so fast in the PaaS world, I think its window of opportunity might prove very tight to squeeze through.

Secondly, although Progress plans to divest the product businesses as laid out above to help it focus much more clearly, it’s currently looking at ways it can continue to make use of some of the Savvion technology in combination with OpenEdge – so it can continue to offer what it currently calls OpenEdge BPM (particularly of interest to its ISV partners). I didn’t get a detailed view of what this might involve from a potential engineering and licensing perspective, and I think it’s probably too early to say. However the company is prepared to go on record to say “While [the] intent is to divest the Savvion (BPM) and Sonic (ESB) products, [Progress is] committed to supporting features that are essential for building and deploying agile, next generation applications.”. This is something that anyone interested in the future of OpenEdge needs to watch carefully.

Third, Progress is going to try to find buyers for its divested product lines as soon as possible; it understands that while there’s uncertainty in the market about what will happen next, those businesses could very easily freeze. Its business plan does assume some short term revenue decline as part of this strategy shift, but my view is that nevertheless Progress needs to work very quickly and diligently from here on; the initial communication fell some way short of a well-managed message IMO. Progress is also confident that it will find buyers quickly; my advice to any nervous customers using the to-be-divested products is to keep a very close eye on where those products go. Your strategy could be affected if a key technology you rely on ends up being owned by an outfit primarily concerned with milking maintenance revenues.

This morning sees the start of PEX Week Europe 2012, a event for process excellence professionals held at the London Film Museum in the UK. The week’s event starts with a pre-summit workshop day focused on Business Process Management – which this year is co-led by MWD’s Neil Ward-Dutton, alongside Forrester’s Derek Miers – and is followed by a packed agenda of presentations, discussions and networking sessions.

If you’re not there in person you can follow the events via a live blog where various people will be posting live updates throughout the week, and you’ll also have the opportunity to take part in interactive Q&A sessions. If you’re on Twitter, you can also track the event via the #PEXWeek hashtag.

Appian – one of the leading independent BPM technology specialist providers – used its annual customer conference earlier this week to significant effect: highlighting recent growth, giving customers and prospects opportunities to learn from each other, and unveiling its next major product release. What it lacked in glitz it made up for in enthusiasm.

Appian had aimed to get around 500 registrations for Appian World 2012, but ended up with 650. I’m not sure if that number was reached at the event, but the main keynote room was certainly pretty packed. Over two days customers, prospects and partners got an update from the BPM vendor and, as well as plenty of opportunities to talk. (They also got to see me do the closing keynote).

The customer presentations were a highlight for me. Now of course a company is going to choose its happiest, most successful customers to stand on stage and share their stories; but what was interesting for me was the diversity on show. Appian is known for being very strong in US Federal Government, but we saw case studies from energy, financial services, insurance, media, property, agriculture, and transport. Some customers were approaching their use of Appian primarily from the perspective of agile application delivery; others were taking much more of a process improvement perspective. All of them highlighted Appian’s responsiveness and customer service, and their ability to get stuff done quickly.

Appian CEO Matt Calkins, on stage on Day 1 following Gartner’s Darryl Plummer in full-on preacher mode, said two things that I think are going to be important to remember over the coming months.

First: Appian’s goal is to “be the world’s best way to organise work“.

Second: the way it’s going to do that is through ongoing smart R&D focused on ease of use, and driving universal participation.

The first part of this is really about casting the proposition a bit wider than what most people think of when they think of BPM technology. Now Appian has long provided a set of capabilities broader than those focused on core process management and automation; packaging content management, portal, collaboration technology into the Appian BPM Suite. But with the resurgence in interest in case management scenarios and the impact of social interaction forms on knowledge work – and Appian’s capabilities in supporting these things -  I think this hook has a lot of potential. Rather than risking being painted into a corner (where ‘BPM technology’ could start to be seen as overly restrictive and less relevant) Appian is declaring its broader ability to build systems of co-ordination; and at the same time it’s using words which make sense to non-specialists (which is a refreshing change in this space).

The second part of this sets up a lot of what Appian is doing with its next major release, Appian 7, due to be released in July. We’ll be publishing an in-depth assessment report on Appian 7 – alongside major updates of our assessments of other leading vendors – in the coming months. Keep watch for those!

Appian is a small company relative to many of its competitors, but is starting to punch above its weight and it’s now definitely moved beyond its previous phase of growing customer project by customer project.In 2011 license growth was 213%. Against this kind of backdrop the company has to be careful to continue to retain its high customer satisfaction ratings; but I think Appian has that covered.

But here’s a new challenge for Appian: as it seeks to be in people’s minds as a vendor in an increasingly mainstream area of enterprise interest, and as it casts its proposition more widely against an ever more chaotic and fast-moving backdrop, it’s going to have to spend more time and effort evangelising its approach and educating its markets and prospects. Appian appears to be a very technically smart, disciplined and customer-focused company; as it looks to deliver against Calkins’ goal, though, it has to be prepared to step outside its technology-focused comfort zone and beat its drum more loudly. I’ve spoken to quite a lot of companies outside the US, for example, that are preparing for projects but that have very little awareness of Appian or how it’s different.

What do you think?

Over the past few weeks I’ve come across a few conversations, both online and offline, that celebrate, or commiserate, BPM’s “death”. Certainly, it’s possible to find evidence that suggests that there’s less interest in something specifically called BPM. A number of technology vendors that have previously put all their effort behind positioning themselves as BPM players now put less emphasis on BPM itself: some are shifting slightly sideways and bringing their case management capabilities/strategies to the fore; others are shifting upwards to major more on specific business issues (that can be resolved through BPM); yet more are shifting another direction, and emphasising core BPM technologies (many people think of these as BPMSs) in combination with other complementary technologies – such as analytics tools, event processing platforms, and so on.

In my mind, though, all these shifts are doing is representing the ongoing maturation of the market for tools that help people improve the way that work gets co-ordinated and managed, through the intelligent application of software. You might call that something else, but I’m going to carry on calling that BPM technology for now.

Up-to-date data from our online BPM capability benchmarking tool tells us a different part of what I think is the same story: building and maintaining a mature BPM capability is tough. As you can see on the tool’s home page, the average benchmark reflects a pretty modest level of maturity across all five dimensions that the tool assesses.

The lifecycle dimension score (which assesses the maturity of practice in each phase of a BPM activity cycle), at 34%, is marginally higher than the others (organisation at 27%, governance at 26%, architecture at 29%, and technology at 27%) – but on the evidence we have here, it seems there’s still quite a long way to go before BPM practice in industry can be called ‘mature’. At the time of writing, this is based on 50+ completed benchmark assessments from across financial services, government, telecoms, utilities, transportation/logistics, healthcare, retail, tech and others; and across every geographical region.

What does this all tell us?

Although this is still a modest sample, I think it provides more evidence that sustainable BPM success is complicated. There may well be a causal link between this fact and the ways in which some technology vendors are shifting their own approaches to the market. (Maybe it’s better to try and sell something “shiny” to leading-edge innovators than continue to sell something to more mainstream technology adopters with more mundane, practical concerns; interests in developing portable skills; and so on).

BPM is far from ‘dead’ though.

If you’d like to use our BPM benchmarking tool and see how you stack up, it’s completely free of charge to access. Let me know how you get on!

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about one of the boring, but important, design considerations that plays a role in delivering the promise of BPM technology: separation of concerns. In this post, I want to highlight its equally unsexy-but-important sibling: support for managed change in process applications.

A big part of the whole point of using specialised, model-driven tools to build process applications – rather than just modelling processes in Visio, PowerPoint etc and then coding something custom, or giving everyone a printed procedure manual to follow – is the fact that the model-driven approach is supposed to make it easier to change things later, change them relatively quickly, and change them with confidence.

Perhaps surprisingly, then, support for change management in many BPM technology platforms is pretty patchy! Who’d a thunk it?

Here’s what I consider a starter list of change management related facilities that are necessary for a platform to support the promise of BPM technology:

• Is version control provided at the model element level (rather than at the source file level – which may be different)?
• Is version control available for all model artefacts that exist (processes, rules, calendars, organisations/roles/groups, events, goals, etc)?
• Is it possible to package up versions of many related models and assets into configurations, which are themselves managed as versionable assets?
• Can multiple application configurations be stored, maintained and deployed in parallel?
• Is there decent support for impact analysis – showing the potential impact of changes to process, organisational, information models, rules or implementation details?
• Is it simple to trace historical changes throughout models, for audit purposes?
• Is any explicit support provided for managing the staged rollout of new processes or versions (to make it easier to deploy in large distributed environments)?

Advanced capabilities that I always look for include:

• The ability to specify that only certain users or roles can deploy new processes or changed processes
• The ability to specify processes that can be used to manage process application deployment publication
• The ability to migrate currently running instances to new process models on deployment.

Quite often, I’ll find that even the “starter” list isn’t addressed very well. Thankfully, the stock response I used to get to my question about change management facilities  (“oh, you can always use the built-in source code control facilities in Eclipse”) is getting less common – but as far as I can see, there’s still a long way to go before these features become commodities. If you’re serious about a BPM initiative and want to use specialised tools to help, this is something you should really think about.

As we renew our BPM technology assessment reports over the coming quarter, we’ll be digging into change management and calling out what, exactly, is available from all the key players. What do you think we’ll find?

If you’re interested in finding out more about our assessment approach, you can get access to our existing assessment guide reports for free here and here. You can also see overviews of our most recent versions of our in-depth reports here. We’ll be making a few changes to the assessment approach for our coming round of work, but the current reports are still relevant.

When OpenText made acquisitions of Metastorm and Global360 within 6 months of each other last year, I blogged:

In the medium term … I hope Open Text will communicate a credible plan that supports existing customers of Metastorm and Global 360 while showing they can also craft a vision for how something bigger and better can be delivered by pooling knowledge and resources.

The period after an acquisition is always a tough one, as customers and prospects look for direction and answers; anyone making an investment decision is understandably cautious. When there are two acquisitions on the table then things get even more challenging! I’ve had quite a few conversations with prospective investors in BPM technology who’ve expressed uncertainty (at least partly because other vendors have sown seeds of doubt – and that’s completely to be expected).

I’ve been keen to get an update from OpenText’s newly formed Business Process Solutions (BPS) business unit for some time, and a couple of weeks ago I got to spend some time with VP of International Marketing and Alliances, Bhavesh Vaghela. Here’s some of what I learned.

OpenText’s new CEO, Mark Barrenechea, has stated that his aim is to grow OpenText into a $2bn company by revenue (though a timescale was purposefully not given). Key to the growth plan, though, is extending the company’s footprint from ECM into business process management (in its broadest sense). The new BPS division – formed from the Metastorm and Global 360 acquisitions – is responsible for making this push.

The Strategy and vision for BPS is oriented around the “outside in” approach to business improvement – which focuses first on customer experience, and uses that to structure, prioritise and shape the ways that an organisation delivers services to its market. The aim is for BPS to organise itself around three propositions:

• Enterprise Case Management – using case management and unstructured process management approaches and technologies to deliver highly tailorable and personalised services across multiple channels and venues, for those areas of work which need to be optimised for flexibility (think front-office capabilities around customer service, sales, and so on – where there’s potential advantage in blending core work co-ordination systems with real-time analytics, marketing automation, decision management and other disciplines).
• Enterprise Service Management – using core BPM technologies to industrialise the delivery of back-office administrative processes within a ‘business service’ framework, for those areas of work which are a cost of doing business and which should be optimised for cost (think some IT service delivery pieces, HR services like leave requests and employee onboarding, and so on).
• Modelling and Visualisation – using analysis techniques and technologies to discover and design portfolios of business capabilities, and set the stage for business transformation projects that then lead to interest in the ECM and ESM propositions above.

Further to this, OpenText is committed to making engineering investments in the three “tech trends du jour”: social, mobile and cloud; to be fair, though, given the outside-in starting point for its strategy, these make sense – and from a cloud perspective BPS can build on the experiences gained by Metastorm in building M3 and testing it on the Azure Platform.

At this high level, I have to say that the BPS strategy and vision looks pretty smart: OpenText seems to have found a way of framing the main capabilities of its Global360 and Metastorm acquisitions that creates a coherent whole that’s also keyed into a set of goals and challenges that many large organisations are wrestling with currently.

Of course, the big question now is all about execution. A sound strategy and vision are necessary, but ultimately not sufficient, for success. Can OpenText’s BPS business:

• extend, re-package, integrate and re-position its current portfolio of technologies so they all fit into the broad strategy and vision?
• bring existing customers with it and not alienate or confuse them?
• educate its salesforce about how all this works, and its value to customers?
• integrate BPS technologies with other OpenText technologies in ways that add value without creating overweight and underpowered / confusing products?
• (there are probably more).

It remains to be seen! I’ll be continuing to watch with interest and report as I hear more.

Earlier today Amazon announced the launch of its Simple Workflow service (SWF) in beta. The announcement (and the attendant – and detailed – blog) explain that

Amazon Simple Workflow coordinates the flow of synchronous or asynchronous tasks (logical application steps) so that you can focus on your business and your application instead of having to worry about the infrastructure.

So: has Amazon introduced a technology that will be useful to organisations looking to implement BPM projects in the cloud? And: how does this fit into the other offerings that are currently available?

To be clear – Amazon’s SWF is a programming framework which will help developers to handle stateful and potentially long-running workflows without having to write loads of tedious custom infrastructure code; and that means that for lots and lots of application developers building SaaS and PaaS propositions, it’s something that is definitely worth exploring.

From what I can tell from an initial pass, SWF can be used not only to assist with programming workflow behaviours that are ‘internal’ to applications that will be hosted on Amazon’s AWS platform; but also used to coordinate execution of tasks and applications that are distributed across multiple cloud platforms and also across a cloud/on-premise boundary. And that means that SWF could be pretty useful for companies building application services on AWS that need to manage long-running state, and also for companies looking to build cloud-based integration platforms and channels where the primary purpose is to coordinate systems from a central cloud-hosted logical point. Again from first sight, SWF appears to be not a million miles away from what Microsoft is aiming to provide (at some point) with the delivery of a decent workflow service within the Azure Platform – and that’s unlikely to be a complete coincidence.

But SWF is *not* a BPM tool or platform in any significant sense, just like a combustion engine is not a car. You can’t use SWF to manage processes through their lifecycles, and you have to code tasks and flows by hand using programming languages rather than through abstract models. But in theory – because there’s some simple runtime instrumentation available, as well as support for things like external signalling (enabling unexpected events to alter flow behaviour at runtime) you could build a moderately sophisticated BPM toolset based on SWF as the core of the runtime platform.

For me, the announcement of SWF is significant not really because it will quickly help organisations get their business processes under management, become more effective and agile and so on, but because it’s yet another signifier that:

• There’s a growing understanding in the general application software developer community that co-0rdination of work is something that needs to be supported explicitly; it’s not enough to build another generation of systems of record; and
• Cloud-based application services are a mainstream consideration, and the things that the majority of industry cares about (not innovators and early adopters) – how do I get this to co-ordinate with other things I have, how do I get data in and out of it, and so on – are rising up cloud platform providers’ agendas quickly.

I’ll be looking for SWF customers to talk to over the coming months to see how much real ‘business process’ work gets done, and how much is integration pipeline work; and also trying to dig into some of the potential technical and commercial limitations that arise in practice.

I’m interested to know what you think, too – is SWF interesting? (For that matter, is Microsoft’s Workflow Framework on Azure interesting?)

Although it’s not a formal part of the BPM research programme I set out in advance at the end of last year, in the past few weeks I’ve been drawn into looking in some detail at the emerging process mining space.

Process mining has been an active academic research space for some years (and eminent BPM research leader Prof Wil van der Aalst leads a team at TU/e which has been instrumental in launching commercial projects as well as advancing research in the area).

The Process Mining manifesto, published late last year, is a really good overview of the area and call to action – and one thing it makes clear is that the scope of process mining technology is much broader than process discovery (which is the area that most commentary has focused on so far, with much discussion conflating the two concepts).

According to the manifesto,  there are three applications of process mining – discovery, conformance checking and enhancement:

• Discovery is about taking event logs and analysing them to produce models of work.
• Conformance is about comparing existing models of work with evidence from event logs to discover any operational ‘gaps’ between prescribed or recommended practices and actual work in the field.
• Enhancement is about using data from event logs to enrich the information provided by static models – perhaps by overlaying performance information, for example; or even using historical event information to predict the performance of work currently in progress and suggest ways to optimise it ‘on the fly’.

What’s particularly interesting to me, based on my reading of the manifesto at least, is that the authors (or at least some of them) appear to propose that process mining in its broadest context provides the foundation for a different kind of process management system from the kind many people are familiar with today – one that’s ‘passive’ rather than ‘active’.

This ‘passive system’ is not like today’s BPMSs, which manage processes and the execution of work using those processes through a core co-ordinating application that orchestrates the flow of work between people and systems.

Rather, through ongoing and continuous mining of event logs ‘in the background’, not directly connected to the systems that people use to get work done, such a system would work by detecting the shadows that work casts onto existing IT systems; tracking those shadows in the context of models (discovered or purposely created); and then using that analysis to drive a) management insights into opportunities for improvement and b) operational insights into optimal execution of work.

As the manifesto itself points out, the engineering and research foundations are already in place to make a system like this possible today. Such a system would have the potential to deliver many of the benefits that today’s BPM projects can deliver, but without interposing a new application layer that risks disrupting relationships that people have with their existing working habits and IT systems.

Still, though, I think it’s going to take a few years before such systems gain significant mainstream traction in industry. Why? Because a lot of the practical detail of implementing such a system in industry would require new tools to be built, and the big vendor money is currently being poured into ongoing marketing and improvement of today’s generation of BPMSs; and there are no vendors of any significant size that could release such a platform in the near future without confusing the hell out of its prospect and customer base.

I think we will see systems like this start to be deployed in the coming years, particularly in scenarios where ‘unstructured’ knowledge work is at the heart of the business domain under consideration – but that doesn’t mean process mining is a dead-end: far from it.

I really think we’ll see a lot of real-world deployment of process mining’s discovery application, and quite soon (in the coming months). Why? Because in this context, process mining techniques and technologies help to address an immediate pain point that an established community of industry practitioners have. Specifically, how to quickly discern the actual state of work in a given area of a business to provide a reliable foundation for analysis of improvement opportunities.

I’ll be looking a little more at this ‘discovery’ aspect of process mining in a forthcoming post. In the meantime, I’d love to get your thoughts on this larger question – it’s still an emerging area and I know I am a long way from having all the answers!

‘BPM in the cloud’ is one of the key themes of our 2012 BPM industry research programme, and as a part of that we’ve just published a short online survey that’s designed to help us quickly take the pulse of what’s going on in this area.

From my conversations with some of the principal providers of cloud-based BPM technology (we’ve already published cloud-focused profiles of Appian, IBM and Pegasystems and more are on their way) it’s clear that businesses are starting to take cloud deployment seriously as an option – not only for early-stage trials, proofs-of-concept and so on but also, increasingly, for operational process application deployment.

To add another perspective we’re really keen to get some solid data from practitioners out there in the field. Are you exploring use of BPM technology in the cloud – and if so what are you hoping to gain? Are you already using the technology – and if so what have you found? Did you think about it, but decide to hold off for some reason? Whatever your stance – we’d really love you to take this survey.

Anyone who completes the survey can request a free copy of the analysis report, which we’ll publish in April 2012.

Thanks very much in advance for taking part – I think the results will be pretty interesting!