Features in a business process management suite

This is a general overview of what’s needed in a BPM or business process management suite. Most of it is borrowed from Gartner, with some portions edited and cleaned up.

The intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) market is the natural evolution of the earlier BPMS market, adding more capabilities for greater intelligence within business processes.

Please note this disclaimer. I’m affiliated with Tallyfy— a workflow and BPM platform which differentiates through incredible ease-of-use, customer-facing features and flexibility to drive adoption in modern teams.

Capabilities such as validation (process simulation, including “what if”) and verification (logical compliance), optimization, and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. iBPMSs have added enhanced support for human collaboration such as integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management.

An iBPMS orchestrates work to produce business outcomes that go far beyond typical process efficiency and performance measures. For Gartner’s 2016 iBPMS Magic Quadrant, we evaluated platforms based on their ability to orchestrate increasingly complex work styles. We see this ability to address a wider variety of styles as increasingly important, particularly in the context of digitalized processes (processes that coordinate the behaviors of people, processes and “things”/the Internet of Things [IoT]) — which require greater insight into context, are executed at an increasingly rapid pace, and span the virtual and physical worlds for both contextual insight and work execution.

Greater contextual insight manifests itself at two levels:

• At the macro level, using on-demand analytics, such as critical path and workload volume analysis, to drive improvements in the process design, which is often useful in continuous process improvement and business transformation efforts.
• At the micro level, using real-time analytics and decisioning (such as business rules and complex-event processing [CEP]) to drive improvements in the execution of a particular process instance, which is useful in ways that go beyond traditional business transformation to the execution of digitalized processes.

In “Critical Capabilities for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites,” Gartner evaluated the nine critical capabilities that differentiate products within the iBPMS market:

• Interaction Management: The ability to orchestrate multiple types of activities and interactions at runtime to support the work that people, systems and “things” (as in the IoT) do to produce specific business outcomes.
• High-Productivity App Authoring: Enables citizen and IT developers to quickly and easily build a process-centric application. Applications built on the platform use a metadata model to manage the complete life cycle of business processes and manipulate data related to the process.
• Monitoring and Business Alignment: iBPMS platform’s support of business activity monitoring (BAM) to continuously track the state of process instances, cases and other behaviors in near real time.
• Rules and Decision Management: Software facilities — such as inference engines, recommendation engines and decision management capabilities — that provide guidance for making human or automated operational decisions according to business directives or policy statements.
• Analytics: Applies logic and statistics to data to provide insights for making better decisions. An iBPMS may incorporate, or have connections to, predictive analytics such as scoring services or prescriptive analytics such as optimization engines.
• Interoperability: Interoperation with external application services and systems that an iBPMS’ adapters and adapter development tools enable. Such services and systems include custom and commercial-off-the-shelf packaged applications and cloud-based SaaS applications and their databases.
• Intelligent Mobility: The ability to access applications from a variety of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. As well as providing access from anywhere, the platform optimizes the mobile device’s native capabilities, including its camera and other sensors.
• Process Discovery and Optimization: The platform’s capability that shortens the time it takes to discover and optimize behaviors (such as processes, tasks and policies) needed to improve business outcomes. This may include analyzing past execution history or simulating proposed
  behaviors.
• Context and Behavior History: iBPMS’ maintenance of an archival history of events that have occurred during the interactions under its control. These events may include process events, decisions, collaboration or other activities. The iBPMS may also manage other kinds of context data — from external applications, databases or event streams — to enhance the intelligence and decisions made by the system.

To support faster time to solution and subsequent rapid changes to business processes, an iBPMS uses a metadata-based and model-driven approach. Graphical business process modeling and business rule modeling capabilities are used to describe the behavior of the solution. Some iBPMSs execute this model at runtime (they are interpretive), while others generate code that is compiled at development time.

The use cases for intelligent BPM suites (which are not mutually exclusive) are:

• Composition of intelligent process-centric apps
• Continuous process improvement
• Business transformation
• Digitalized process
• Citizen developer application composition
• Case management

Composition of Intelligent Process-Centric Apps

This involves using the iBPMS as a composition platform to coordinate mission-critical, industry-specific or company-specific processes more effectively. Business managers use an iBPMS in this way when they recognize the need to coordinate a longrunning process or improve business performance through broader and better coordination of processes. Alternative solutions are often unavailable as commercial packaged applications because the area is often a differentiating or innovative process. However, because buyers have some existing software assets for the process domain, they choose to implement an end-to-end solution using the iBPMS as a composition platform, often complemented by a process template from the provider (see “Make Business Operations More Agile With Intelligent Business Processes That Reshape Themselves as They Run”).

Please note this disclaimer. I’m affiliated with Tallyfy— a workflow and BPM platform which differentiates through incredible ease-of-use, customer-facing features and flexibility to drive adoption in modern teams.

Continuous Process Improvement

This is when the business (rather than the IT organization) strives for continuous process improvement (CPI), having previously pursued process thinking. CPI stems from well-understood process methodologies, such as Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma, which manufacturing industries have used for years. However, in the past decade, many companies in industries such as financial services, healthcare and telecommunications have brought their BPM programs to a CPI level, often adopting Lean Six Sigma as a methodology.

Business Transformation

This is when senior business executives want to take “game changing” action by rethinking one or more business processes to redefine their businesses for survival. Senior business executives pursue business transformation — also known as business process reengineering — in response to significant industry changes resulting from regulatory changes and the global economic recession.

Digitalized Process

Digitalized process shortens the time it takes from contextual insight to action. It speeds the delivery of a unique customer experience or response to inputs from the IoT. This use case involves using a highly intelligent process to respond in an optimal way to the unique context presented by business moments (see “Make Business Operations More Agile With Intelligent Business Processes That Reshape Themselves as They Run” and “What Does It Mean to Digitalize Work?”).

Citizen Developer Application Composition

This uses the process orchestration capabilities of an iBPMS with less dependence on operational intelligence and advanced analytics. This is a new use case added to this year’s evaluation. This use case focuses on the ability of the citizen developer (business users and business analysts) to build process-centric applications with minimal involvement from IT development staff.