Intalio User Conference Take Away's

I just spent two days with the Intalio folks at a BPMS users conference. I have been researching BPM as the next extension of my background in process, six sigma and quality. I like Intalio because they are an open source solution being built by a bunch of passionate pioneers in the industry. It was a great opportunity for me to continue to explore the possibilities associated with BPM.

I have been spending a lot of energy thinking about how to make the business more agile and transparent. I had become disillusioned with process charts because they were static, not real, not executable. However, every time I wanted to change a core application it cost too much money and took too much time. BPM seemed somewhat artificially to me, a more sophisticated mapping tool until the concept of web services became more mainstream. The reality of using a web service as part of executable BPEL generated from a process flow built using BPMN suddenly made this process real.

In my case, it seems that encapsulating key functions of my core applications via web services in a layer of BPM would really give me the ability to "Mash Up" business process that are alive and can allow rapid logic, task or flow changes without changing the underlying services that are built on the core applications. I have run many improvement projects that wrote lots of custom code into application effectively building process into them... process that would surely change as the business did. An adaptive business, it would seem, is one where processes are configurable. As you learn, they learn. Sometimes the best way to learn is to just try it. Traditionally, that was very hard with many processes and applications... at least in an enterprise way.

I was challenged to rethink how I discovered, tested, and deployed processes. I saw examples of business process mash ups where processes were built, tested, and deployed in minutes. I have pages and pages of ideas, notes, discoveries, and questions. As I begin to sythensis this, I will share my thoughts. As I practice it; I will share my thoughts.

What I saw was both exciting and scary. Exciting because I saw a tool capabilities and a way of thinking that could really change, for the better, how we make the organization more adaptive. Scary because it is yet another layer and dependent on the organization thinking and acting differently. Not to mention, I need to get those key web services built.

Let me pause with this thought... I see that I would no longer be building processes. Instead, I would be building process services. Services that could be called by an application based on some event just as easily as they call on the application to do something based on an event. For someone who straddles the business and IT, that is a fascinating concept that has so many possibilities.