The Future of BPM: Flying with the Eagles or
Scratching with the Chickens?
Peter Dadam
Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Germany
{peter.dadam}@uni-ulm.de
Abstract. Service-oriented architectures, business process management
(BPM) systems, and BPM in general receive a lot of attention these days
and the number of articles which describe the benefits and great poten-
tial of these technologies has significantly increased. It is something like
a second wave after the first (and short) workflow hype in the middle of
the 90’s. However, the contemporary hype in newspapers and IT mag-
azines does not really reflect reality. In fact, much more companies are
still thinking about whether and in which form they shall introduce these
technologies rather than concretely performing projects in these fields.
And many companies which have started respective projects are still
in the phase of designing and implementing (web) services or in evalu-
ating SOA platforms and repositories of different vendors; i.e., they are
still not bringing (larger) processes into production. Nevertheless, expec-
tations are very high: Everything will become easier and more flexible,
implementation of cross-organizational processes will become business as
usual, and process management systems will enable new kinds of process-
aware applications which have to be performed manually today. In fact,
BPM has a great potential. However, to realize this potential in practice,
we have to face much more the challenges of the real world, we have to
learn more seriously from how business processes are executed today,
and we have to understand how actors deal with exceptional situations.
It is not hard to predict what will happen with the current BPM hype
if users discover that they cannot do much more with these technolo-
gies than with previous ones or, even worse, that they can do less. And
no organization will accept to become inflexible. – It is partially up to
us, whether BPM will become a big and sustainable success or whether
it will share the fate of many other hypes (like Computer Integrated
Manufacturing at the end of the 80’s). This talk will present real-world
examples from different domains to illustrate where we jump too short.
It will use the ADEPT project [1, 2] to show how stimulating it can be
also from a research point of view to face the reality as it is.
References
1. Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: ADEPTflex – Supporting Dynamic Changes of Workflows
Without Losing Control. J of Intelligent Information Systems 10(2) (1998) 93–129
2. Reichert, M., Rinderle, S., Kreher, U., Dadam, P.: Adaptive Process Management
with ADEPT2. In: Proc. ICDE’05. (2005) 1113–1114
