Towards Cognitive BPM as the Next Generation BPM Platform for Analytics-Driven Business Processes

Human-centric business processes in the enterprise are knowledge-intensive, and rely on human judgment for decision making. This reliance impacts the integrity, uniformity, efficiency and consistency of the process enactment over time. We describe our experience and challenges in driving the adoption of business process management tools in the sales process at a large IT services provider. We argue that in knowledge-driven and human-centric activities such as IT services sales, current technologies do not meet the needs. They do not support data capture and analytics around process and using it to reason about and take action on the process. Process definition and enactment, both, needs to be dynamic, flexible and adaptive based on the understanding of the state of affairs. We present a vision and a framework for a cognitive BPM system where the knowledge management, user interaction and analytics are employed to dynamically assess and proactively adapt the process based on the results of data analytics and continuous learning from the actions taken.