The current developments in the area of BPM seem to me to be a major revolution. Not the "hype" itself, which will pass by its own nature, but two essential changes: (1) applications increasingly are replaced by engines that execute models directly, and (2) the business starts to grasp that they are the actual owner of the models (data, process, rules). Why is this revolutionary? Because the IT-development departments loose there critical position. Let me explain shortly.
The first revolution is the engine revolution. Applications don't need to be programmed anymore, the model is enough. That is because the engine understands models and can execute them. Examples: business rule engines understand formally described rules, process engines can execute process language specifications like BPEL. The good-old DBMS actually is a data-engine. The essential features of an engine are executiveness and declarativeness: the engine can execute without compiling the specifications, and the model can be specified without technological and execution-dependent issues, you have just to model what you really want to define (programming habits like memory management, garbage collection, variable declaration etc are no issues anymore and handled by the engine itself in a generic way). Engines are the applications of the future: generic, suitable for a complete range of business domains, and configurable-on-the-fly by the business owners themselves. Business application development in the traditional sense becomes obsolete.
The second revolution is the engineering revolution. One consequence of making applications configurable is that you need configuration discipline. Other than programming discipline (which is the discipline of technical considerations), configuration discipline needs a thorough consideration of the business itself, on a semantic and pragmatic level. Questions like what do I mean with the concept customer, when do I accept a product request need to be answered. The answers need to be unambiguous, non-contradictory and complete. Which means that the business needs to declare its structure and concepts clear in itself, also called business engineering.
What we will probably see in the near future is that business engineering is taken up by the application developers: they will help the business making their models consistent and complete. Developers, therefore, need to become business analysts. And because the technology will hide itself more and more in the engines themselves (developed by engine engineers), the role of business analyst will remain, probably returning to the business organisation itself. The result: IT will not be on the critical path anymore. Isn't that revolutionary?
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