The morning finished with a session on Pega’s SmartBPM product vision by Kerim Akgonul and Russell Keziere. Due to overruns in the earlier sessions, they had to try to cram a 30-minute presentation into about 8 minutes.
They covered off some of the keys to BPM success within organizations:
- Create a vision for a transparent path to success: enablers, methodology, communications, culture, etc.
- Deliver a dynamic and compelling user experience, a common theme with many BPM vendors right now
- Share and collaborate across the enterprise
- Give BPM to anyone who needs it, anywhere
They then mapped some of the new functionality of SmartBPM against these requirements:
- Platform as a service, allowing for new BPM deployments to be rolled out with much less infrastructure effort through a multi-tenanted architecture that allows a new instance — complete with pre-configured processes, rules and best practices — to be created in a few minutes
- Distributed business edition, including:
- Integrated Work Manager, a composite application portal environment for accessing multiple SmartBPM instances in a single environment, including a consistent UI and cross-functional prioritization of work
- Virtual Enterprise Repository, a library of reusable processes, rules, services and other software assets, to encourage reuse and enable governance
- Business Intelligence Exchange, allowing SmartBPM data to be consolidated into existing BI environments for analytics and reporting
- Multi-cluster Autonomic Event Services, which provides performance monitoring and optimization across all of the SmartBPM clusters within an organization, based on advanced diagnostics and SLAs
- Flexible layouts and UI enhancements to enrich the SmartBPM user experience with some AJAX-y goodness. Some of this is as simple as automatic alignment when components from different sources are combined on the same screen, plus a number of new rich controls such as tree structures. There’s also support for mashups, although they didn’t elaborate on this.
- Using BPM as part of the BPM development methodology to create an accelerated software enabled methodology that shortens the implementation cycle and optimizes BPM resources, using:
- Application Profiler to directly capture objectives
- Project Management Framework for organizing, assigning and monitoring tasks as well as tracking changes and providing an audit trail
Pega continues to innovate and create tools for deploying BPM, but some of the complexity around the methodology and the system itself can give potential customers pause when they’re comparing it with systems that (appear to) have a shorter learning curve.
They ended up taking most of the intended 30 minutes anyway, but with a long lunch break up next, it should all shake out by afternoon.