Forrester (and prior to that, long-time independent) BPM consultant Derek Miers often extolled the virtues of “case management” over “generic BPM” (and it was often commented that TIBCO BPM technologies were well regarded in this area). Yet until recently there seemed to be not much going on in the case management space except for the appearance of a few specialist case management vendors.

Then TIBCO and Cordys presented back in 2008 on “Dynamic Business Activity Modelling” that led indirectly to the current OMG RFP work on the “BPM superset” called “Case Management”. The pertinent TIBCO technologies we presented, over and above conventional BPM, were Conductor (goal-driven processes), CEP (rule and event-based processes), and combinations thereof (goals, rules, CEP, processes) such as in TIBCO AFF. Subsequently it seems that there has been a veritable explosion in interest around case management: for example, Fujitsu’s Keith Senson (chair of the WfMC) has published an acclaimed book on what he and WfMC are calling Adaptive Case Management. Per WfMC and the very popular LinkedIn discussion board on this, the area also covers the idea of social collaborations in “process” development and execution (another hot topic, per advocates such as Sandy Kemsley).

Processes, decisions, rules and event processing, with Inference Rule use cases

At the OMG meeting last week I discussed the nascent OASIS SAF framework with CA’s Paul Lipton, and its possible role in providing a standardised collaborative (a.k.a. “social) community framework for suggesting / organising / developing solutions (a.k.a. “processes”) to problems (e.g. business goals and issues - see BMM) … we will cover more on this idea later. Meanwhile, I offer the interesting observation that (1) SAF is based on the ideas of medical practices (symptoms, prescriptions, etc), and (2) case management’s widest use is probably healthcare (e.g. see the Wikipedia reference). Coincidence?

From the CEP perspective, I presented at OMG and SemTech this week the idea that business processes are just ways of organising events, decisions and actions, and that capabilities like Operational Intelligence are just advanced business processes - and are dynamic and “case oriented” too in many scenarios…

An email from Layna Fischer, who is editor of the annual WfMC’s “BPM and Workflow Handbook”, tells us that the theme for the 2010 handbook is a “Spotlight on Process-Driven Business Intelligence (BI)”. To wit:

In 2010 we include a special spotlight on “Process-Driven BI” to illustrate how Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are increasingly intertwined. Linking business intelligence and business process management creates stronger operational business intelligence.

Users seek more intelligent business process capabilities in order to remain competitive within their fields and industries. BPM vendors realize they need to improve their business processes, rules and event management offerings with greater intelligence or analytics capabilities.

We welcome submissions that include issues, case studies, guidance, solutions or research such as:

* BPM integration with collaboration, portals and BI
* BPM-BI with application assembly and deployment
* Dynamic event-based BI driven by BPM
* Embedding BI applications into business processes

Taking the 4 points above:

1. BPM integration with BI - this is quite an easy one as reporting (BI) on the process statistics gives insight into the long term performance of your processes - and thence areas for improvement. An obvious TIBCO example is TIBCO iProcess Spotfire - although this is more analytics than simple paper reporting…
2. BPM-BI with application assembly and deployment - I have to confess I have no idea what this phrase means! Is this BPM and BI for the software development process, perhaps? I have a feeling it is something to do with the aspect of BPM that is “visual coding” of straight-through-processes (for the event community: using BPMN to write single-event-handling applications). Traditionally there is usually insufficient data around to justify regular changes to traditional business processes, but this changes with the advent of analysis. Indeed the need to change processes often can lead to the use of things like rule-driven processes… a pretty common use case for TIBCO BusinessEvents in fact!
3. Dynamic event-based BI driven by BPM - this too can have a number of interpretations!
   • “Event-based BI” could be “event-based analytics”, through CEP. You would normally expect such “events” to drive process changes or business processes directly (e.g. “oooh look, the market trend for “wimbles” has started to go up!”). So this would be detecting events to “drive BPM”, not the other way round.
   • One could have a workflow to control manual views of your BI reports on incoming events - and this is again “BI as a process”.
4. Embedding BI into business processes - although this implied some “BI process” in a business process, I would expect it to be the simpler case of embedding BI results (decision changes, for example) into an existing business process - surely the classic use of BI in BPM… a slightly specialised case of the first point above.

But the above analysis is somewhat moot. More interesting is Layna’s assumption as indicated by the phrase:

BPM vendors realize they need to improve their business processes, rules and event management offerings …

So at least one BPM expert has come to believe that business process management encompasses managing events, rules, and processes… not just “process diagrams”!

If anyone is interested in submitting something on this, note abstracts are due Feb 17.