In this years version of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on iBPMS, it’s clear that the focus is turning to Digital Transformation capabilities. It’s no surprise that the three vendors in the all important top right quadrant are PegaSystems, Appian, and IBM, but it is interesting how much emphasis they’re putting on suites that offer transformative functionality beyond traditional modeling and process execution.
Gartner defines an intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) as an integrated set of technologies that coordinate people, machines and things. It emphasizes:
- Support for real-time human collaboration, including integration with social media, mobile and cloud access to processes
- Advanced analytics, real-time activity monitoring and decision management for intelligent coordination and management of the interactions of process participants
They go on to highlight advanced features like adaptive process change and complex case management where processes are less prescribed and more agile given real-time business context. In the discipline of process management, we have long since leaned on the value of continuous improvement and learning from past process execution results. However, we are now in an age where even the most agile develop programs can’t move fast enough. We are looking for technology solutions to guide us through real-time paths that change given our current situation and context data.
It’s not enough to simply capture process data, we must constantly evaluate that data, analyze decision outcomes, and automate process change on the fly. The focus in these areas by the top players, and some top challengers as well, is helping businesses to truly operationalize their digital transformation.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2020, 50% of the companies that have renovated their ERP core and migrated their IoT infrastructure to a standardized platform will increase customer interactions by over 20%.
By 2020, 70% of new integration technology deployed will have unified application and data integration capabilities within a single platform.
While companies look to improve the user and employee experience in their systems, they are hoping to reduce complexity and cost with consolidated platforms. Of course integration and interoperability was listed as one of many factors being evaluated, but I was surprised to find so little mention of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in this report. I’m quite sure that topic will show up on some other analyst review and/or chart; but I suspect RPA will be a critical factor in the coming year for the success of some of these platforms and transformation programs. As customers look for easy to use, adaptive platforms, they’ll most certainly look to leverage existing assets through increased process automation capabilities.
Shout Out!
On a side note, I’d like to give a shout out to the great team at BP3, which got a mention in the Strengths column for BonitaSoft as part of their large ecosystem of certified partners.
