CamundaCon 2019: ING on taking a regional BPM platform global
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
Derek Vandivere of ING Netherlands finished up the first day of CamundaCon 2019 here in Berlin taking about how they moved from a regional to global platform migration — strange, because he’s actually talking about their Pega implementation although they’re also implementing Camunda — and how to work around the monoliths. I know that Derek’s wife is an art restorer, and this has obvious rubbed off on him since all of his slides were photos of Dutch Masters paintings that were (however peripherally) related to his subject matter.
Different ING regional operations selected different BPM engines: the Netherlands went with Pega, while Germany went with Camunda, with other areas building their own thing or using legacy TIBCO. They’re attempting to build some standards around how people talk about BPM and case management internally, as well as how applications are developed. As a global bank, they need to have some data, rules and processes that span countries, making it necessary to consider how to bring all of these disparate systems together.
He went through a number of the best practices and lessons learned that they discovered along the way as they rolled out a regional solution globally. Although his experience with the Dutch implementation was based on Pega, there are many transferrable lessons here, since a lot of it is about higher-level architecture, bottlenecks in processes and decision-making (often human bottlenecks, although some technical as well), and how to interact with the business areas.
He discussed with the current pressures on their monolithic iBPMS (Pega) platform that echoed some of what I talked about this morning: proprietary developer training, container-based microservices architecture, and multiple distributed deployment models (support for both cloud and regionally-mandated on-premise). Replacing or upgrading any sufficient complex IT is going to be a challenging task, but doing that with a monolithic iBPMS is considerably more challenging than a more distributed microservices architecture.
We’re about to spill out onto the Spree-side patio here at Radialsystem V for a BBQ and well-deserved refreshments, so that’s it for my coverage of this first day at CamundaCon 2019. I’ll be back for a couple of sessions tomorrow morning before heading south to Bolzano for next week’s DecisionCamp.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
