The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture, Event Driven Architecture, Software as a Service, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing (CEP). In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed - IT services which are associated with the business process steps. Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of a process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services. A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organizations.
Adaptability and flexibility. One of the things that is mind-boggling right now is how much we have to change all the time. For anybody who’s into comfort and structure, it gets harder and harder to feel satisfied in the company. It’s almost like you have to embrace a lot of ambiguity and be adaptable and not get into the rigidness or expectation-setting that I think there used to be 10 years ago, when you could kind of plot it out and define where you were going to go.
There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes. The apparent benefits revolve around faster reaction to competitors and markets, as well as quick response to management and collaborative tuning. There are more subtle opportunities to get ahead of the game and anticipate customer demand, thus creating the ability to generate incremental revenue streams that play off of increased demands. Customers may also be enabled to make changes to their individual processes as they interact with an organization. CRM efforts are struggling to have a differentiating customer experience. BPM with explicit rules will allow this experience to evolve and become individualized.
Based on feedback from clients and earlier surveys, I have compiled and listed the benefit themes below:
Business Agility: Faster reactive and proactive time to market
Decision Making: Test rule-based scenarios at lower cost
Revenue Opportunities: Greater product, pricing and flexibility
Customer Satisfaction: More-customizable products and services
Compliance; Greater visibility into policy adherence
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