The Intelligent BPMS Magic Quadrant

Not to be outdone by Forrester’s Recent wave of Dynamic Case Management, last week Gartner released their own next-generation evaluation for Intelligent Business Process Management Suite vendors:

According to the new Magic Quadrant report,

Business managers and knowledge workers today … are being asked to make faster and better decisions and to “do more with less” in an ever-changing business context, but cannot do so without improved visibility into their operations and environments. To meet this challenge, leading organizations are seeking to make their business operations more intelligent by integrating analytics into their processes and the applications that enable them. Gartner has identified … a new usage scenario for a business process management suite (BPMS) — a scenario that Gartner calls “intelligent business operations” (IBO; see “The Trend Toward Intelligent Business Operations“). To meet the needs for IBO, a BPMS must be enhanced with new capabilities. Accordingly, Gartner has evolved its definition of the business process management (BPM) market to reflect the IBO usage scenario and to introduce the next generation of BPMSs, which we identify as intelligent business process management suites (iBPMSs).

This is part of a growing trend from multiple fronts to extend BPM technologies beyond their traditional uses. Integrating support for social, analytics, complex event processing, and mobile has allowed these tools to deliver a new level of value creation potential. Whether the trend is labeled “Dynamic,” “Adaptive,” “Intelligent,” or something else, organizations that have captured the majority of the benefits from traditional BPM technologies will see additional value from deploying this newer breed of integrated technologies into their business processes.

Gartner has identified 10 core capabilities of an iBPMS:

• A process orchestration engine to drive the progression of work in structured and
  unstructured processes or cases
• A model-driven composition environment for designing processes and their supporting
  activities and process artifacts
• Content interaction management to support the progression of work, especially cases, based
  on changes in the content itself (such as documents, images and audio)
• Human interaction management to enable people to naturally interact with the processes they are involved in
• Connectivity to link processes to the resources they control, such as people, systems, data,
  event streams, goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Active analytics (sometimes called continuous intelligence) for monitoring activity progress, and analyzing activities and changes in and around processes
• On-demand analytics to provide decision support or decision automation using predictive
  analytics or optimization technology
• Business rule management to guide and implement process agility and ensure compliance
• Management and administration to monitor and adjust the technical aspects of the iBPMS
• A process component registry/repository for process component leverage and reuse

Or, for the more visually minded, iBPMS features are described in their November report, BPM Suites Evolve Into Intelligent BPM Suites with this figure:

You can find Gartner’s full report at Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites. (Login may be required to access reports linked in this post.)