What is iBPM?

iBPM stands for intelligent business process management. iBPM takes an already great BPM tool and enriches it with additional intelligence, including features like cloud computing, event processing, real-time decision-making, and systems crosslinking.

In simple terms, intelligent BPM goes a leap beyond traditional BPM and builds a dynamic technology environment based on value-added knowledge work.

Since its introduction as a concept by Gartner in 2012, businesses have been calling iBPM the next big thing in the enterprise BPM domain

Gartner has included iBPM as a unique ranking category since 2012. As they put it, “The intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) market is the natural evolution of the earlier BPMS market, adding more capabilities for greater intelligence within business processes. Capabilities such as validation (process simulation, including "what if") and verification (logical compliance), optimization, and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. Intelligent business process management suites have added enhanced support for human collaboration such as integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management.”

Here the Definition from Gartner:

“The intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) market is the natural evolution of the earlier BPMS market, adding more capabilities for greater intelligence within business processes. Capabilities such as validation (process simulation, including "what if") and verification (logical compliance), optimization, and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. iBPMSs have added enhanced support for human collaboration such as integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management.”

According to Tom Nolle of CIMI Corporation, there are 3 different use cases of iBPM:

1) Service extension for mobile users
To bring mobile users closer to the process no matter where they are.

2) Expansion of analytics capabilities
To add more firepower to a BPM’s analytics and spot trends for process optimization.

3) Capability to process real-time complex events
To run complex event processing (CEP) and offload the burden of analytics

How is an iBPMS Different From a BPMS?

Intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS) are the more useful, likeable, and successful version of BPM. It’s like the more pleasant, savvy son who takes over the business from his crotchety, hard-to-like father.

Jim Sinur coined the term iBPM when working with Gartner. He says that iBPM emerged as a result of BPM’s inability to become dynamic. Businesses needed intelligent processes and BPM fell short of delivering the operational responsiveness to leverage latest technological advances.

According to Sinur, “Before intelligent processes came along, processes needed to be pre-programmed and have happy paths of execution.It was clear that the kind of processes companies wanted to attempt went way beyond the kind of process technologies [that were] available [around] 2011.”

Here are the ways an intelligent BPM system differs from its predecessor:

Complex event processing
Real-time analytics to support Intelligent Business Operations
Interactive social media platform
Good support for mobile platforms

iBPM: Converting Data into Results Through Connectability

iBPM tackles the first problem through its connectivity with cutting-edge technology to automatically analyze data and optimize workflows. Integrating outside technology and applications into traditional BPM processes often requires a dedicated team of programmers to build custom solutions. In contrast, iBPM software orchestrates multiple applications to weave innovative, cutting-edge technologies seamlessly into workflows. By incorporating new technology like event-processing and predictive analytics into workflows, the time it takes to act on insight gathered from process data is drastically reduced.
Two main benefits stem from the quick conversion from insight to improvement: better exception handling and continuous process optimization. iBPM predicts problems and changes the workflow correspondingly based on real-time data. This expands the scope of BPM software to automate processes that are prone to exceptions. It also generates more data about changes made to continuously improve processes. This way, process data continuously feeds back on itself so workflows are constantly improved over time.

The State of iBPM

While some BPM software providers are starting to implement iBPM capabilities, years remain before it becomes the standard. The technology that makes it possible to automate decision making and data analysis has not fully matured. However, as cutting-edge business intelligence (BI) technology matures, BPM software will start to resemble true iBPM platforms. As iBPM proliferates in the market, exciting possibilities are in store for organizations of all sizes to rapidly transform their businesses through intelligent process automation and optimization.

Benefits of iBPM: