There’s a perception that business process management (BPM) platforms are one of those staid categories of software where the pace of innovation is glacial. However, at CamundaCon 2019 last week, it quickly became apparent that modern BPM software is quickly emerging as one of the pillars of digital business innovation.
The challenge most organizations face today is that it takes months to craft a new business process or modify an existing one. Consequently, the business isn’t agile enough to rapidly respond to changing conditions or exploit new opportunities that would enable it to establish and maintain a competitive business edge.
Camunda BPM enables organizations to overcome that challenge by taking advantage of a workflow engine in combination with a microservices architecture, to become more agile. At CamundaCon 2019, IT and business leaders from AXA, Lufthansa, ING, Deutsche Telekom, Roche, Helsana and Indiana Farm Bureau, among others, all described how they employed Camunda to make their organizations more agile than ever.
Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer also announced a preview of Camunda Cloud, the first BPMN-based, horizontally scalable workflow automation technology available as a service. As noted by Camunda CEO Jakob Freund during his opening conference keynote, the goal is to move away from hardcoded business processes based on monolithic platforms that conspire to make the business inflexible.
“There’s a dysfunctional relationship between IT and the business that leads to inferior customer experiences,” says Freund.
Freund told conference attendees Camunda addresses that issue by providing the platform through which organizations can create truly innovative business processes. This gives users an advantage over competitors relying on legacy BPM platforms and packaged applications that result in every organization employing the same set of undifferentiated business processes.
Rather than waiting months for application developers to customize those platforms using antiquated waterfall processes, Camunda enables organizations to embrace the best software development practices to create new digital customer experiences in a matter of days and weeks or, in some cases, a few hours, says Freund.
At the dawn of the age of digital business, it’s clear organizations will need to make some critical IT decisions. There are always going to plenty of rote business processes that may just as well be served by a packaged application. The challenge and opportunity organizations are now being presented with is to identify which processes truly differentiate the business in a way that makes being able to customize them at will, using a modern workflow platform, a truly strategic imperative.
