AAMAS 2004 – Panel on Business Process Management

Tom Wagner, Ph.D.DARPA / IPTO

twagner@darpa.mil

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BPM• Disclaimer – not to be confused with fact…

• Broad space / BPM may involve a bundle of ideas:– Human task/workflow management.– Information flows, e.g., auto-magic information exchange to support human work.– Union of that space -- human work management + information management.

• BPM = business process awareness + management.– Progression of focus for practitioners: transaction processing (data in), then business intelligence

(information from your data), to process awareness and management.

• Many different slants driven by different areas of commercial interest:

Process-centric workflow.Optimization, what-ifs, dynamic task management.

Information management.

Enterprise applications.

Software infrastructure.

Others.

Not drawn to scale.Axis unknown.

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BPM and Agents• Sidebar: standards

– BPMI – business process management initiative. www.bpmi.org Nonprofit company w/goal to setup standards. E.g., BPML (meta biz process modeling language) or BPMN (graphical representations of BPML).

– Others: BPEL (“bee pell”) web services + biz proc (MS, IBM, BEA, SAP). UML (OMG) = component view.

• Why agents? Places to hook arguments for:– Distribution – large scale, privacy concerns between different companies, etc.– Lose coupling – integrating heterogeneous systems and people in dynamic setting.– Autonomy – efficiency value proposition (automation makes things faster).– Choice – important for dealing with humans (also mixed initiatives).

Process may also have choices that need to be made locally.– Intelligence – pushing autonomy from simple data triggered action to complex task

performance or complex analysis.– Adaptive, dynamic, flexible, etc.

• Stumbling block for (some) agents: explicit representations of processes.– Commercial folks have the same problem ( template libraries).– Implies look to domains with documented processes.– But often existing models will lack features, e.g., choice nodes, parallelism.– May not be an issue -- depends on your BPM vision and how near term you are operating.

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As a researcher…

• How you approach BPM is dependent on your needs and goals.• Select a subset (of that space) and clearly define the subset.

• Consider being complimentary to (but not competing with) commercial interests.• Shoot high / offer a new capability that dovetails with where they are going.• Hard to compete with development or near term work.

• If you need external investment / are working for “real world” impact:• Parallel application spaces, e.g., military.• Or know your customer. Voice-of-customer should modulate:

• Your argument for an agent approach (why distributed, etc.).• Your value proposition.• Potentially your long term technical vision.

• You decide the balance of customer voice versus research vision.

• Most value propositions will include efficiency improvements (faster, cheaper).

Make Your Own Custom BPM Vision

Commercial: Process-centric workflow.

Research: distributed dynamic human activity coordination in RT environment.

Research: learning to adjust workflow models.

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Why I like BPM as an Application Domain(Unsure about being “the” killer ap)

• Amenable to “agent” solutions.• Two ways to motivate investment:

1. A product for sale.2. Internal use / not for sale.

All companies, agencies, universities, etc., can improve efficiency of processes. Potentially cheaper / smaller barriers.

• Some version of the problem space is probably accessible to you.• The problem exists today:

– You will be proposing new solution to a known (and familiar) problem. Les Gasser’s anecdote

– i.e., not developing both a new product and a new market.

Ansoff’s Product-Market Expansion Grid

Products

Current

New

MarketsCurrent New

current product,current market.

new product,new market.

current product,new market.

new product,current market. yes

initial state

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Process-centric WorkflowAgents vs More Conventional Approaches

• Gross categorizations – probably ranges of things.

• *If* conventional workflow is often:– Centralized.– Complete / global information.– Top-down – tasks are put at human effectors.– Monolithic / fully integrated.– Tending toward static.

• An agent approach might be:– Distributed (implies scalable, implies ability to span enterprises).– Able to operate with partial information.– Blend top-down (direction from management) with bottom-up (performers inputting

preferences, choices, and tasks themselves).– Loosely coupled (easier to integrate heterogeneous systems).– Tending toward dynamic / adaptive.

• For the predictability question – if you can get a customer to ask that question, they are already interested in your vision. (You have to generate your own actual response to that question.)

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Funding Your Custom BPM Vision Incremental Investment / Payoff

Hypothetical vision: intelligent systems, stupid systems, and humans that work together both within an enterprise and across enterprises.

Project Years

ResearchCost

n.5

Hypothetical waypoint: centralized management of tasks of two humans who always work on related

process / have activities that interact.

Catch-22: You still have to shoot high or they don’t need you.

Incremental investment.

Problem: research is expensive, payoffs are uncertain, takes a long time to make anything happen.