I am attending the Gartner BPM 2009 summit in sunny San Diego, CA (at least usually sunny – my plane to San Diego was rerouted because of weather).
The most exciting part from my perspective is that Gartner is putting real focus on what they call unstructured (and they also use the term chaotic) process. It is a new area for them that they are formulating, but they are taking it seriously. At the kickoff Keynote Janelle Hill spoke about “The new design principle is to accept that there isn’t a required and fixed flow of activities and tasks!” – sounds exactly what we mean when we talk about human process management. Then she went on to stress “Nondeterminism is one new aspect of work patterns. … as we move to a knowledge based economy dominated by services, human interactions increase in importance to successful work outcomes. New BPMS products treat human interaction patterns in the same way that they treat commerce transactions. Social interactions are now part of the visible and auditable process. Software is used to coordinate these interactions, not to control them. “

I’ll have more on the summit later – but wow, it looks like we are finally becoming mainstream