Taylor Dondich, ProcessMaker’s CTO, gave his views on BPM industry trends in the November 11th BPM.com podcast. This is the third article in the series. It explores some of the reasons why many BPM products fail – as well as which are poised for success.
Current State of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation has been the industry buzz phrase for the last five to ten years. Many of the large enterprise BPM vendors still adhere to the digital transformation message. Those vendors generally offer large, complex enterprise applications. These traditional solutions are often accessed via a desktop computer, while there is some movement to the cloud.
David and Goliath
The current BPM solution market is a bit like the David and Goliath story. Some BPM lumbering giants still exist in the past. All of their solutions come bundled into one enterprise offering, creating a one-stop-shop buying experience. While there is significant market penetration of these enterprise applications, new digital tools are emerging and challenging this traditional status quo. These nimble market entrants threaten the old paradigm with their newfound agility. We are already seeing this evolution in BPM beginning to unfold. Businesses are adopting multiple best-of-breed solutions, in whatever form they might take, to solve business problems rather than opting for a one-size-fits-most solution that might be strong in one area and weak in others.
A New Emerging Norm
A new norm is beginning to develop. It’s becoming more common for businesses to adopt 50 to 100 types of products as opposed to one enterprise vendor. Apps are proliferating at exceptionally high rates and there is an increased desire to use them in workflows. Businesses now need BPM vendors that will support all of the products they want to use in their workflows.
The Digital Ecosystem
Gartner defines this new digital ecosystem as “an interdependent group of enterprises, people and/or things that share standardized digital platforms for a mutually beneficial purpose, such as commercial gain, innovation or common interest. Digital ecosystems enable you to interact with customers, partners, adjacent industries ‒ and even your competition.”
What’s Trending?
Being able to utilize email clients, digital signature technologies and a wide variety of functions from within a workflow are becoming table stakes. The creation of a digital ecosystem of business products is starting to result from this new type of strategy. Since businesses are starting to take advantage of many different apps and solutions, they now require their BPM platform to interact with everything in their digital ecosystem. The BPM vendors that understand this emerging digital ecosystem model and take advantage of it will be the ones that thrive.
What’s Up Next?
Now that the blog series has set the stage by identifying key trends in BPM, the next article in this series will focus on ProcessMaker’s strategic direction.
