Attending bpmNEXT event again this year in Santa Barbara.  Have been looking forward to this event for quite a few months, so happy to be able to join again this year.  Will try to blog about my impressions

Bruce started with a kickoff and introduction, explaining why bpmNEXT is different from other BPM events out there (on purpose!), trying to bring together some of the best and brightest people leading BPM efforts across the globe.  And he’s right (at least in my opinion), bpmNEXT is different, which is why I enjoy returning to it every year.

Jim is pitching how process is now part of a much bigger ‘digital’ shift.  The focus is on the customer journey (or employee or partner journey), to make everything smarter, faster and better – hopefully resulting in new business opportunities, better customer loyalty, agility, etc.  A lot of different technologies (including BPM and DMN of course but also AI, chatbots, self service, etc.) are all converging towards the same goals.  Rather than just data, the focus is moving more to intelligence.  And rather than doing it all at once, he presented 10 mini journeys that can get you closer one step at a time, focused on one specific area they have seen customers have success in (content, collaboration, process, persona, customer interaction, analytics, AI, agile, low code and business functions).  He zoomed in on areas like the decision management framework and customer journey mapping.  But processes are still at the center of IT innovation, although they are driven by much more, including AI, wearables, etc.

Neil is trying to summarize for us a lot of the discussions he’s been having with their community related to automation.  There is an abundance in technology (all playing a part in automation), resources (with cloud), competitors, etc. generating lots of expectation (and investigation) but also fear, chaos and disruption.  Customers need a way to organize this tsunami of technologies.

Neil introduced a model for representing how work gets done.  Customers need to think about how this applies to them, ranging from very programmatic (P) (like straight-through processes), transactional (T) to very exploratory (E) work (like case mgmt).  Depending on your focus, different technologies (AI, Decision Mgmt, Machine Learning, RPA, etc.) might be playing a role in that.  With a rapid moving technology market, customers might end up with a combination of a lot of those.

After these introductory talks, the ignite presentations are kicking off.

Consensys is using BPMN in combination with Blockchain.  By using processes to interact with the Blockchain, it simplifies how to work with smart contracts and takes advantage of some of the process capabilities (e.g. timers) for some of the logic.  They are presenting two use cases: a token sale and anonymous voting.  

Whenever a request for buying tokens comes in, the process is responsible for creating the smart contract (encrypting some of the information), checking the funds available and passing along the tokens, etc.

The voting system allows you to put in some information about the vote itself and who should participate.  Again a smart contract is created and allows participants to register and do their vote (again encrypting).

IoT devices produce a lot of data, but how to create the glue that connects this data into your operational decisions?  By creating data flows (in this case from a cooling tower for example), you can combine data from different listeners, transform it, and take actions (using a library of extensible components).  Active listeners will be looking for the relevant data from the IoT devices and can then for example end up triggering a BPM tool, call an AI predictive service running in the cloud, etc.  Doing so can transform your Internet of Things into an Internet of People, helping the people making the operational decisions as much as possible.

One of the challenges executing processes is how to easily get an idea of its status, one that makes sense at the business level. (Low-level) app events (coming from your processes) are given business context (making them business events) and used and combined to keep track of business goals.  A journal is then collecting these business events and can be inspected by business users, reacted on, etc.

More coming after lunch.