2019 will bring with it some major changes to the BPM industry. I will venture to say that 2019 will be the most transformative and disruptive year that the BPM Industry has seen in the past decade. I know that is a big statement, but there are a number of currents in the industry that have now taken us to a tipping point and should cause definitive industry shifts. First, let’s look at the major currents affecting the industry:
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
This is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. With companies like UIPath having raised more than $400 million and Automation Anywhere nabbing $300 million from Masa Son, the stakes are big. The BPMs vendors all seem to be trying to figure out how to dance effectively with RPA. And, it literally is a dance. Most BPM Vendors have published blogs showing how you can wrap BPM around the execution of bots thus positioning BPM as the higher-level process orchestration engine. This, of course, makes a lot of sense. A standard service task in a BPM diagram initiates a bot with a standard connector and then waits for the bot to call back to the API of the BPMs to keep the process moving along. In this scenario, the BPMs serves the purpose of the overall orchestration engine and integrator of human decision making. But does BPM offer enough value here? Maybe.
Machine Learning (ML)
No doubt that the AI we are all watching on Netflix is still a good few decades away. However, the ML required to eliminate lots of clunky OCR driven business processes and help forms morph into friendly chatbots is already here. This will cause a very large percentage of business processes to get reworked and reconfigured. The off-shoot of this is that customer experience will change and get much better. Some BPM vendors will focus on the customer experience messaging while others drive their message around ML/AI. Either way, there is a lot of value that is going to be delivered here. Unfortunately, there will also be lots of jobs eliminated as well.
