Panel - Future of BPMN - Technology and Industry @ BPM 2008

I hosted a panel at BPM 2008 early in September. Here is the abstract / outline.
BPMN has seen huge adoption over the past four years. It has become very popular with business analysts, tool vendors, practitioners and end users. BPMN brings business and IT together in a collabrative environment where as designed and as implemented are the same. In this panel, we discuss the two major forces that will shape up the future of BPMN. On the one side are technology trends like Web 2.0, SaaS, Semantic web and Cloud Computing which will impact the way people define and execute their business processes, and at the same time there are the needs identified by industry practitioners to facilitate meaningful adoption like closer alignment with organizational models, facilitating process discovery and monitoring. We believe that these two forces will define the future of the BPM industry and therefore we have invited a slew of BPMN and technology practitioners to this panel to discuss the future path for BPMN.


The panelists:
Marlon Dumas, University of Tartu, Estonia
Paul Harmon, Business Process Trends, USA
Jana Koehler, IBM Switzerland
Sebastian Stein, IDS Scheer, Germany
Alexander Grosskopf, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam, Germany


We were lucky to have Peter Dadam and Professor Wil van der Aalst in the audience and they took on the panel. we delved into the current state of BPMN adoption thanks to wonderful insights from Paul Harmon. There was a quick tour of the history thanks to Jana. Sebastian gave his thoughts on how they see BPMN requests from time to time. Alex gave a few updates on the current work he is doing around BPMN at HPI. There was also a discussion on the execution semantics of BPMN and how close / different it is from BPEL execution semantics. An interesting discussion overall. Although I wish we had more time to look at the future trends of technology impacting BPMN. Nevertheless, next time!