It's first necessary to understand why you're modeling your processes, and the requirements for the model: these could be related to quality, project validation, process implementation, as part of a larger enterprise architecture modeling effort and many other reasons. In the land of BPM, we tend to focus on modeling for process implementation because of the heavy focus on model-driven development in BPMS, hence model within our BPMS, but many organizations have other process modeling needs that are not directly related to execution in a BPMS. Much of this goes back to EA modeling, where several levels of process modeling that occur in order to fulfill a number of different requirements: they're all typically in one column of the EA framework (column 2 in Zachman, hence the name of this blog), but stretch across multiple rows of the framework such as conceptual, logical and implementation.

The most important role for business is probably documenting current-state business processes and analyzing them for possible improvement. But conventional practices in this area are inefficient and inherently small-scale.

They showed some quotes from customers, such as "the current economic climate is BPM nirvana" and "BPM is not a luxury," pointing out that companies are recognizing that BPM can provide the means to do business more efficiently to survive the downturn, and even to grow and transform the organization by being able to outperform their competition. In other words, if a bear (market) is chasing you, you don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun the person running beside you.

IBM has been collecting BI and analytics pieces for a few years now, beginning way back in pre-history with the acquisition of Ascential. This was eclipsed when they acquired Cognos ($5B), the largest BI vendor at the time. There have been quite a few other smaller ones, such as AlphaBlox, Applix, Exeros and others. And let's not forget ILOG a year ago. You can't put predictive analytics into motion without a Business Rules Management System to drive the process. If anyone thinks this acquisition of SPSS marks IBM's serious entry into analytics, they've been sleeping.

On the flight home, another pleasant surprise: Wi-Fi and AC power at my seat in coach! For about the same price as one of those nasty "snack-paks" they offer, you can get in-flight Internet service coast-to-coast. While other airlines solemnly invoke policies and procedures to ban cell phones, GPS devices, and even powered headphones below 10,000 feet, Virgin America has figured out that giving business travelers an extra full workday might be good for customer satisfaction.

Interest in streams and events has definitely picked up in the last few months -- I've reported on novel applications for "continuous transformation" and otherwise done a bit of writing to promote awareness -- and next year could very well be the break-out year for BI on data and event streams.

The RFP asserts that BPMN is inadequate for case management but that case management should leverage BPMN for the "process" part, and I agree with that. It also seeks to tie in to OMG government task force efforts on records management for the case folder part. That might be useful as an option, but I hope it's not a requirement.

External tools are subject to evolutionary forces and either adapt or die quickly, whereas we are forced to put up with Paleolithic-era tools inside the enterprise because it's a captive market. 21st century enterprises, however, aren't putting up with that: they're going outside and getting the best possible tools for their uses on demand, rather than waiting for IT to provide a second-rate solution, months or years later.

The essence of BPA is a suite of tools for modeling the business and a repository for those modeling artifacts: not just processes, but strategies, goals, and metrics; value chains and capability maps; process models, from high-level maps to detailed BPMN diagrams; organizational entities and roles; policies and rules. All of these models are linked through the repository. Such suites are central to business process management at the enterprise level, and historically they have been aimed at a small priesthood of architects who don't mind the 5-figure cost per seat, mind-numbing complexity, and three weeks of intensive training. But you can't really create a culture of BPM within an enterprise, or move from isolated projects to an enterprise BPM program, without democratizing modeling and analysis. BlueWorks does that.

Still, the timing could not have been worse, considering that the US Government began discussing how cloud computing fits into their $78 billion IT budget for 2010. Many in the private sector are looking at cloud computing as well. The hype leading them there is the possibility of saving some money.

The newly released version is still lacking a lot of expected BPMS functionality, but has focused on the features that SAP's customers said that they needed the most: human-centric BPM (since there are existing products in the SAP suite that cover lower-level orchestration) and an integrated composition environment that can eventually be used for process composition across all layers -- human-facing tasks, Web services and core ERP processes.