Critical issues currently face BPM adopters and practitioners, such as the key roles played by process mining uncovering engagement patterns and the need for process management platforms to coordinate interaction and control of smart devices. BPME represents the strategy for leveraging, not simply surviving but fully exploiting the wave of disruption facing every business over the next 5 years and beyond. Without question, one of the single most disruptive events in the last decade was the introduction of the smartphone. Consider for a moment how great of an impact this has had on the relationship between businesses and their customers. Not even the emergence of the Web and Internet-based digital native business models can compare with the level of intimacy now available with your customers. People, Things and Processes that run in this connected world leave behind vast digital footprints of these processes, things, people, interactions, and daily rhythms of the society. As a result, the Internet is a powerful tool to persuade, connect and engage humans and things alike serving as the common fabric of interconnection among everything. In his chapter Woots: Smart Things that Can Think, Act, Learn and Talk, Surendra Reddy introduces the concept called Web Of Open Things (Woots)that are everyday "Smart Things" with a specific identity, intelligence, address and presence on the Internet and capabilities to self-organize and communicate with other things with or without human intervention. In the era of the Internet of Things where smart homes, appliances, cars, phones, virtually imaginable devices are all connected, BPM must, and will, be everywhere. As Peter Whibley discusses in The Internet of Things Will Be Invisible, by 2025 there are expected to be more than 26 billion or more connected devices. In the chapter Digital Prescriptive Maintenance: Disrupting Manufacturing through IoT, Big Data, and Dynamic Case Management, Dr. Setrag Khoshafian introduces the 4 Vs of thing data, specifically Volume, Velocity, Variety and Value. From monitors and remote sensors, to appliances and vehicles, to tens of billions of other things, connected devices are generating meaningful and informative data that would easily overwhelm any human being, but collectively they present critical context about processes and the state of operations. The growing ubiquity of connectivity always within reach combined with new services and capabilities such as mobile banking is a key part of driving constantly-changing expectations. Yet digital disruption is not limited to mobile devices, and is in fact disrupting everywhere BPM is otherwise found, and why BPM everywhere is becoming the new normal. Robots, sensors and other data-generating things require vertical integration to create managed, measured, and actionable feedback loops. This is a critical difference of BPME, a difference which risks being lost in its subtlety. BPM, and specifically BPME, is necessary to bring these innovations into mainstream business operations. Resolving the challenge of connecting the growing spectrum of intelligent things is what will drive the BPM investments and digital transformation initiatives of the next decade. Is your enterprise ready for BPM Everywhere? Ready or not, here it comes!
