What does Route Planning has to do with Business Process Management?

Not so long ago we used paper maps to plan our route and recently we got used to online route planners like Map24 and maps.google.com to plan our route in advance.aanbieding WegenAtlas But who does not remember the quarrel between their parents if Mom could not find where we where on the map and Dad missed the exit. Of course that time there where not so much traffic jams like these days but still we would love to be on time for our appointment and searched for alternative routes.

 

tomtom-one-3The introduction of the Car Navigation Systems saved a lot of marriages and they warn us also or traffic jams even before they are on the radio. Besides that, they propose alternative routes and calculate the estimate time of arrival. But what i like most is the fact that i can neglect the advise of this nice lady, “my kids gave her a name – Carin”, and still she serves me by re-calculating the route and keep on giving me advise how to reach my destination.

The Car Navigation System uses “Services” and “Events” to serve my daily important Business Goal “reaching my destination”. The events it receives are position, speed, traffic information and the services it provides are calculating route, display route, giving direction, speak direction, calculate arrival time, etc. It uses basic traffic rules and has a context namely the correct map.

car navigation

There are still some improvements to make like: 3d-view, real-world buildings, online-information and search all of them already prototyped by Volkswagen and Google which you can see on here. But above all the most compelling feature that still is missing is the abilityLifster to learn from my driving behaviour, the route i normally take, the advises i ignore and other preferences like nice girls along the road that want a lift.

But what has this all to do with BPM i hear you think.

We still live in the stone age of route planning when it comes to BPM. The vendors show us nice drawing tools which we should to draw our two-dimensional Route using fancy features like BPEL and we can even introduce some conditional logic WOW!!

process flowWhen will we enter the era of real-time “Car Navigation like” event driven Business Process Management systems? A BPM system that only needs a starting point and a goal and that uses Events to trigger State Transitions which lead to pre-defined Activities. A BPM system that figures itself out what the most optimal route is to reach the goal, that can handle traffic jams at our desks, find out that other routes exist to reach our destination and preferably learn from our human “Agile” behaviour to adjust itself over time.

As Gartner states20070524-events enterprise “the volume of events in an Enterprise is Growing Rapidly” and trying to analyse and model all possible routes and events during a business process will never comes to an end let alone that we will never be able to catch up with those growing volume of business events.

 

I hope this blog will start some discussion about the current state of the so-called BPM Engines which in my opinion are just plain old Workflow engines (Old wine). I’m not saying that those tools don’t have value, they have for the purpose they where developed, but it’s an illusion if you think that these tools will enable you to support your complex business processes.

What does Route Planning has to do with Business Process Management?

5 thoughts on “What does Route Planning has to do with Business Process Management?

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  • February 12, 2008 at 8:31 pm
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    Today I came across a very good article of Tony Bear that explains really well the difference between BPM-folks and WS-folks. In essence it explains that BPEL (and all those tools that are based on that) is an executable process language, which is good for integration purposes, but it’s NOT suited for supporting Business Process Management cause of its tight coupling with technical service invocations. BPMN serves the analysts in drawing nalysis diagrams, but it’s NOT executable.
    See for the whole article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/process-component-models

  • February 10, 2008 at 2:07 pm
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    Business process management software on the market today maps a rigid process mostly incomplete and inaccurate without the possibility to make a quick simple improvement. We in ISIS understand that corporations and users need an agile business process definition which works more like a Navigation System and we deliver this with our Papyrus Objects Process platform. So like with a Car Navigation system where the driver can simply decide if there is i.e. a traffic jam to follow a different route it can be done by the Event and State driven Process Engine in Papyrus.

    And we took this even a step further!
    The User Trained Agent in Papyrus will learn from the user like a trainee would learn from an experienced colleague. Each agent is trained to deal with typical business cases which are handled by a certain role. The trained multi agent system understands the business processes of the organization by the means of being able to deal with all business cases. The business case decision patterns are stored in the repository and thus reusable by all the other agents in the system when they need to perform work for a particular role and business case type.

    The trained business case is a perfect example of a complete SOA compliant business case that has not been coded or programmed and does not restrict the organization in continuously improving its business processes, all without having to analyze them first and without the need for complex analysis and rule coding work. The overall cost and time of implementing and maintaining business processes is reduced to ONE QUARTER of the usual state-of-the-art BPM tools. Additionally it does not require programming skills that no business has sufficiently today.

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