As 2010 winds down, many business process professionals are finalizing plans to take their BPM initiatives to the next level in 2011. With so many different BPM trends and predictions floating around out there, I’m sure you’re scratching your head wondering which trends to adopt in 2011 and which trends to push off for another year. 

My colleague Gene Leganza recently published an excellent report titled "The Top 15 Technology Trends EAs Should Watch". I was pleased to see several BPM-specific trends show up in the report’s “Top 15” list. For the second year in a row, the report highlighted social BPM as one of the top trends to watch. In addition, process data management — the combination of MDM and BPM — was highlighted as another top BPM-related trend.

I recommend reading the entire report, since Gene does an excellent job slicing the survey data to show how we selected and ranked the top 15 trends.
 
So, as you're finalizing your 2011 BPM plans, here are the hottest trends and capabilities I recommend adding to your road map:

As some of you know, I am hopelessly addicted to golf. I can already hear you asking, “What does golf have to do with marathons, and what do marathons have to do with business processes?” Well, I’m glad you asked. Before becoming a golf addict, I was a runner – running 5Ks, 10Ks, and half marathons. My goal was to work my way up to a marathon. This is still my goal, but I learned a while ago that you can’t be a serious golfer and also be a serious runner – they both compete for long stretches of time on Saturday mornings (although I did have someone recommend that I combine the two into "marathon golf").

When I was a runner, I quickly learned that how you run a 5K or 10K is different from how you run a half-marathon. It seems obvious now, but when I trained for my first half marathon I didn’t realize how critical it was to hydrate all the way through and to also change your breathing technique. Ultimately, I found a training program that helped me get ready for my first race, and I ended up crossing the finish line in pretty good time and without killing myself.

Over the past few months I’ve been interviewing companies that have successfully applied social to their BPM initiatives. As part of this research, we’re identifying best practices for combining social with BPM and identifying specific patterns on how BPM and social are coming together. The patterns identified thus far include:

• Collaborative Discovery – Extending process discovery and design to include interactive real-time involvement of business users, customers, and partners.
• Shared Development – Extending process development methodology and tools to support development collaboration between business and IT roles.
• Process Guidance – Provide real-time suggestions and guidance for completing a particular activity based on real-time analytics and/or social network analysis (e.g., crowdsourcing techniques).

Today, with some fanfare, Oracle announced its Oracle BPM Suite 11g Release. Although the product has been GA since late April, Oracle is just now launching a major campaign to announce and promote the new release.  

The Oracle BPM Suite 11g release comes as a long-awaited announcement for former BEA customers that built large-scale BPM practices and competency centers around BEA's AquaLogic BPM (ALBPM) Suite offering.  Since Oracle announced its acquisition of BEA in January 2008, many of these customers have been scratching their heads trying to figure out whether Oracle was going to kill BEA's BPM Suite in favor of Oracle BPEL. And in some cases, Oracle helped fan the flames of confusion by putting out conflicting messages about which product would survive.

Prior to joining Forrester, I led a dedicated BPM practice for a global consulting firm based in Washington, DC. I stood up the practice with Fuego - a leading BPM suite vendor at the time - as our premier BPM suite partner. We transitioned to partnership with BEA when Fuego was acquired by BEA in 2006. And then finally transitioned to partnership with Oracle, when Oracle acquired BEA in 2008. Over the past 5 years I've had a front row seat - across sales, delivery, and support - to the evolution of the product that Oracle now calls Oracle BPM Suite 11g. I've seen its sparkles and its warts over numerous large-scale implementations for public sector and commercial customers.

Pega's announcement last week to acquire Chordiant sparked an interesting debate within the BPM world: Is Pega becoming a CRM vendor?  Is Pega moving away from BPM?  Is this a move by Pega to better connect customer experience and business process improvement initiatives? 

Over the weekend I took my daughter to see "Alice in Wonderland"  and couldn't resist comparing Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter character to Pega's recent move to acquire Chordiant.  For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it's not as weird as the usual Tim Burton movie; but the Mad Hatter character is a little disturbing, with his rhymes and riddles that keep you guessing at his true meaning.

For many process professionals, Pega's recent move was just as confusing as having a conversation with the Mad Hatter.  What exactly is he trying to say anyway?