And I will be blogging about my impressions of the presentations here.
This is part of a 5-part blog series on bpmNEXT 2019:
Day 1 (part 2)
Day 2
Day 2 (part 2)
Day 3
BPM 2019-2023: Outlook for the next five years
Nathaniel Palmer
Nathaniel is kicking it off with his traditional presentation of looking forward and predicting what we might see in the next few years in the context of “Intelligent Automation” (yes, the conference is still called bpmNEXT but the consensus seems to be that this term seems to cover better what we are discussing here). He actuall started by looking back to the predictions from 5 years ago, where he predicted the 3 R’s (Rules, Relationships and Robots). This all seemed fairly accurate, as “robots” are here now, and they definitely need rules. And the data is scattered across many systems (over 13 systems on average, many external) and all need to be related. Some of the 2019 prediction are that by 2022,
- 50% of the work will be done by robots
- 70% of the work will be done on third party cloud platforms: so that means that the “Intelligent Automation Platform” architecture that was presented a first time a few years ago, has been updated a little to reflect this (where the event bus is now much more inherently part of the cloud itself)
- 80% of the user interaction will be done through an interface other than the smart phone (think smart speakers), moving from a worklist metaphor to much more conversational interaction.
Since the concept of work is now much broader (including robots, autonomous intelligence, decision services, etc.), what’s the best way to represent and model this, as traditional flow charts have reached their limits in representing more adaptive requirements.
He also made a case for intelligent automation to shift to taking much more short term decisions based on the most recent live events as the business value is typically much higher if the response time is as small as possible and based on the most recent data rather than calculated the best approach long upfront (like how for example Waze can give me a much better route compared to just finding the shortest route long upfront).
Technology combinations that digitally deliverJim Sinur
Jim is making a case for open “Digital Business Platforms” where emerging digital technologies can be combined and are at the basis for digital transformation. Quite a few of these exist and could be considered proven solutions but typically only in specific areas (e.g. AI, analytics, BPM, collaboration, cloud or IoT).
Industry round table: how cloud architecture is redefining product suites and automation platform strategies
- Unified platform that gives access to independent services in a containerized way
- Public / private / hydrid and multi-cloud
- Componentisation to guarantee elasticity of the solution
- Pick and choose the features you need rather than installing one big monolith
- Making the platform easily available where you are measuring
- Standards can be useful to achieve this to some extend
- There will always be differentiators built on top
- It’s going to be hard to do this without more standardization (e.g. common data model)
- Use of an integration and api mgmt solution to be less dependent on specific integration
- Partner ecosystem is changing, from partners implementing solutions to partners offering value-add on top
- Cloud as a vehicle towards a unified target ecosystem, open-source as a way to generate collaboration
- System integrators are evolving to become more consultants delivering best practices than the technical challenges alone
- Partners build relationships and focus on specific verticals or areas
- The advantage is that standards like BPMN and DMN are independent of the technology used to do the actual orchestration
- Connection to events is missing?
- Running into the limitations on how the standards can be interpreted vs how they were written, which leads to various challenges
