Gartner BPM summit Day 3

I had a short day on the final day of Gartner’s BPM conference in San Diego this week, since I had to catch a flight back to Toronto in the afternoon, but I managed to attend the morning sessions.

The morning started with a keynote by Yvonne Genovese of Gartner on changes to expect in enterprise business applications over the next 3-4 years, primarily ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle. Although at first glance, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with BPM, it really has everything to do with BPM: as customers stop accepting the monolithic world view and pre-determined workflows of the business application vendors, they want these systems to expose their functionality as services, then orchestrate the services using BPM. Instead of using the business application directly to do, for example, an order-to-cash process, a more agile and visible order-to-cash process created using BPM will invoke some of the business applcation’s functionality as services, as well as consuming other internal and external services as part of the process.

This isn’t going to be on the business application vendor’s terms any more, either: Gone are the days of the vendor picking a small set of software vendors which which they integrate, and restricting a customer’s options to working only with those products, customers will be able to create their own ecosystem of vendors. They’ll continue to use their large business application vendor for many of the core services, but more like a large toolbox of services rather than a monolithic application; then they’ll pick and choose other services from any vendors that they choose to work with to round out their business processes. And with the processes implemented using a BPMS, all of the related tools come into play, such as modelling, simulation and monitoring. This falls in line completely with the themes that I noted on the previous two days of the conference: the growing importance of both visibility and agiilty in processes.

I spent most of the rest of the morning in sessions about business rules: first, a presentation by a Fair Isaac customer, Discover Financial Services, and then in a panel hosted by Jim Sinur of Gartner with two other end customers discussing their use of complex rules systems. It’s well understood by now that business rules -- or decision management, in the current vernacular -- are a critical part of BPM to help both with automating decisions and suggesting courses of action to a human participant. The focus of these two sessions was more directly on the use of decision management across the organization, both as part of BPM and for other decisioning.

Discover’s case study was particularly interesting, since as a credit card company with 50 million cardholders, there’s a lot of things to make decisions about, and many areas of risk to juggle while doing so. They actually use three different rules engines, then combine the results in different ways depending on the situation. All in all, they’re starting to automate -- and optimize -- decisions in everything from individual purchase approvals to customer contact strategies to portfolio scoring, with the ultimate goal of reducing losses and increasing revenue.

You can read all of my (much less structured) "live blogging" posts from the Gartner BPM summit over on my ebizQ blog.