"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." -- Yogi Berra
I thought David Kelly's forecasts and thoughts on the near-term BPM market ("A Look at the 2007 BPM Market") to be thoughtful and thought-provoking, and encourage all reading this to read them. I also found James Taylor's rules-centric follow-up, "Business Rules and Business Process in 2007," to be similarly inspiring, and equally worth reading.
I'll try to come up with some useful predictions of my own about the marketplace, which you'll read here as soon as I've divined what they are. (See the above quote.) Meanwhile, here are what I think are 10 (or so) of the top questions BPM practitioners will have to consider – as will vendors who want to be considered trusted advisors and suppliers to those practitioners.
1. Who owns the processes for defining and prioritizing business processes, and how best to empower and equip them?
2. What processes and tools are best suited to supporting the multifaceted collaborations needed to define, prioritize, and promulgate business processes?
3. How best to assure that all BPM efforts are sufficiently human-centric to enable effective business knowledge management (BPM) and human interaction management?
4. How should BPM solutions and vendors evolve in response to the integration of BPM features into a wide range of other applications and services? What tools and processes will orchestrate and manage these most effectively?
5. Assuming a credible value proposition for BPM, how best to deliver and pay for it? Is a Salesforce.com-like software as a service (SaaS) model viable for BPM-specific applications and services?
6. What processes and solutions will best achieve and maintain appropriate integration between BPM and security initiatives, policies, processes, and solutions?
7. How best to reconcile the increasing functional breadth (also known as "complexity") of BPM solutions suites with the need to integrate with incumbent solutions for analytics, intelligence, and other functions -- and limited, task/benefit-focused budgets?
8. Given the growing number of free process modeling tools, and the availability of free open source BPM solutions, how best to evaluate, select, and integrate as appropriate?
9. How best to assess the growing number of alleged "best practices" for BPM, and to adapt the most promising to enterprise-specific business goals and needs? Which vendors can be most helpful here, and how?
10. What policies, practices, processes, and solutions will best help to get and keep everything IT does focused on enabling and supporting core business (and human) processes, even as business goals, processes, and technologies change?
Well, that about covers it. For now, anyway. No pressure. Really.
Feel free to drop me a line, to quibble about the list, to add questions you think equally important, or to talk about how such questions are or are not being addressed at your enterprise. Confidentially, of course.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
