As we begin the new year 2023, Bonitasoft CEO Charles Souillard and CTPO Nicolas Chabanoles offer some insights into what’s coming in the world of business automation.
What does the future of business process automation look like?
No, they can’t see magically into the future! But as leaders in business process automation, they’ve got some insight into what’s moving around in some places in the automation universe!
What emerging technologies will we see highlighted in business process automation?
Charles: Companies are going to be finding a new balance between highly centralized and highly distributed technologies.
The wide use of modularity and component-based development in software has been successfully applied for many years now. We see it trending in “composable enterprise" systems infrastructure, built up of independent components that can be swapped out when needed. And we are also beginning to see the trend in business applications that are built from interoperable elements.
Composability may be the word for 2023!
This concept comes from Gartner: a composable enterprise is an organization capable of adapting, and dynamically combining (and re-combining) different independently developed business functions.
I’m sure that we will see more and more examples of digital assets that can be used as “building blocks” in business processes, both for business process efficiency and for automation.
Nico: There are already simple composable technologies used in process development, from very simple ones such as re-usable widgets to build user interfaces, to more complex, specialized technologies that work together to automate different components in different places throughout a complex business process.
We are going to find that more and more “composable BPM elements” will emerge to help manage the orchestration of multiple technologies. For example, developers are already able to create a reusable block of orchestrated actions for some complex, repeatable actions across several PaaS components in a business process from a set of standard or customized connectors.
We will see more of this as DevOps teams create and re-use modular units to build end-to-end business processes using plug in user interfaces, business data modules, technology orchestration, and the like.
Will there be innovations in our old friend, BPM?
Charles: I see some significant shifts coming in the BPM platform approach to business process automation. BPM applications will evolve towards more independence, through changes to deployment and production. Independent applications mean lighter, more easily maintained applications distributed through an organization and across the enterprise.
Nico: Business teams need responsiveness and speed from IT as everyone continues to look for ways to maximize go-to-market. We’ve seen IT leverage microservices and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) for iAAS offers, and it’s very likely that this paradigm is going to be expected from BPM solutions too. A new “lighter independent applications” approach should look at BPM automation platform technology differently, as a collection of small, independent and loosely coupled services instead of a collection of apps dependent on a shared set of platform resources.
Bonitasoft understands what business needs to be successful. We’ve built our BPM-based business process automation platform to accelerate business process application delivery for efficiency, continuous improvement, and innovation. Bonita’s flexibility and platform extensibility equips professional developers and DevOps teams with powerful tools to develop highly customized, fully integrated business applications faster.
Here are 3 ways to learn more:
- Build highly personalized, process-based applications today, for free, with our open source Bonita Community Edition.
- See how you can reinvent your business processes with BPM. Watch our on demand Bonita Platform Demo.
- Interested in full project lifecycle support and services from development to operations? Try unlocking the power of Bonita Enterprise Edition. Contact us to learn more.
