BPM-EAI

In today’s morning print edition of WSJ, this news (for ref) would have caught any technocrat’s attention.
Everybody in general knows and many B-schools professors have articulated the paradigm shift in technology and business where Apple has moved from Mac to i-P* and Google from search engine to Android and now the buyer of Motorola Mobility. But Microsoft didn’t make such waves. Is Microsoft unable to appeal young users other than X-box?
The technological one-upmanship is so critical that even a moment delay in delivering the latest technology oriented product puts the company in back seat. Look at Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo… they are still selling but none of them are leaders and they still have products that are latest but still not the latest.
The thought process however carried this over to systems Integration - whether there is such a similar trend in BPMS, BRMS, SOA and CEP. Or are they still lagging behind in terms of time to market, cost of implementation, cost of maintenance, cost of change or upgrade and overall agility that is expected of technology nowadays?
Another example; In an SOA implementation, one of the service components need to be updated and thus a new version of the service definition should be available. Can it be done in a day’s time? Today, it goes through the usual change management process and day’s time is never feasible to ensure stability and quality. This is not an excuse to compromise quality or stability but an opportunity to do a faster development, testing and implementation. Off-the-shelf governance tool will help in managing multiple versions of the service component with ease and off-the-shelf service mediation will help in compatibility across consumers and producers catering to use different versions.
This is where the system Integration vendors, both on the software products as well as services would need to work on. There are products on BRMS and CEP that makes this quite close to the desired goal where hot deployment, no shutdowns are necessary to get new rules added to the rules engine. Still there is a governance process to make changes to rules that would take more than a day’s time to test and close it.

Ultimately, imagine a business user who conceives a new idea to improve her job and as she thinks, she just draws that concept out on her iPad or Playbook with an app for BPM tool where there is no restriction to use specific notations but whatever comes to the mind and whatever the hand can draw. The partial intelligence is however in the app that translates that into a standardize BPMN based model and creates the byte code equivalent deployed for runtime, goes through the software life cycle automatically and finally available in production just in a matter of milliseconds and then we realize the objective of “BPM at speed of thought”. Obviously this is quite simplified but should not surprise if it happens anytime in near future.