This is the eighteenth and last edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will not try to explain why we need a free BPMS, for I believe everybody will agree that having something for free is always nice, and as my good friend Bruce Silver once said, why buy a BPMS when you can get one for nothing? Actually, our competitors might disagree, but I can live with that. Instead, I will tell you a little bit more about what’s coming next on the BPM 2.0 front.

First, I’ll package the original BPM 2.0 article and subsequent 18 weekly posts into a single white paper, following the advice given to me by Steinar Carlsen. Soft copies will be freely downloadable from the IT|Redux website, while hard copies will be available for purchase online. I have tried to use Office 2.0 applications for publishing this document, but the lack of proper support for pagination made the exercise virtually impossible. I guess I will have to use a regular word processor for the time being.

Second, I must admit that I lied in the introduction to this post. This is not the last edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Next week, we will start a new cycle, going through the same 18 principles for BPM 2.0, but this time around talking about how actual customers are getting benefits from the application of these principles. I have no idea whether I will be able to come up with actual customer examples for all 18 of them, but I will do my best. I will also try to relate to Intalio|BPMS when applicable, but you will soon realize that as much as I love this product, it does not yet comply with all 18 principles. If you ever thought that BPM 2.0 was just a shameless attempt at promoting the company I work for, think again. I am promoting a vision, and my work at Intalio consists in trying to deliver on it, not the other way around.

Third, I will try to explain why BPM really is cool. Recently, there have been some discussions here and there about whether BPM is cool or not, and whether it should matter at the first place. Well, to me, BPM really is cool, much like a database or an operating system can be. If you cannot fathom such a thing, I won’t hold it against you. After all, everybody is free to get a kick out of whatever they like. But as far as I am concerned, BPM, or what I call BPM 2.0, might be the most important development the enterprise software industry has seen over the last twenty years. On this front, the BPMS is on par with the RDBMS, and the lives of many a developer were changed with the introduction of such a technology. Not in the same way as the introduction of a new vaccine would, but in a very significant way nonetheless, and if that is not cool, I do not know what is. Now, to many, BPM remains an obscure thing, something they have a hard time relating to, and my job on these pages is to change this perception and to show that BPM is real, powerful, effective, and cool.

Last but not least, I will report progress on the BPMS Challenge. Bruce Silver is running with it as official referee, and I got his assurance that he will thoroughly investigate the claims made by a couple of vendors who believe they won the challenge. Knowing the products in competition, I must express very serious doubts about it, but I would love to be proven wrong, as long as the game remains fair, and I trust Bruce that it will. In the meantime, Intalio is actively working on its product in order to participate to the challenge later this year.

I love this BPM thing! It’s so cool…