Papers by TIBCO, EMC, IBM and more of the usual. I should have known. Changing the buzzwords to address a problem we solved twenty years ago.
In 1989 I was solving manufacturing problems using what BPM looks like today. We had a tool "Flex" - not Adobe's animation tool but a Petri Net modeling and processing tool. I used Flex to drive a real-world manufacturing process that could be specified in hours, instead of months. It was pretty cool stuff.
Twenty-two years later I am building similar systems. I just finished a Business Process Modeling and Business Rule Management System for Bank of America/Merill Lynch. Pretty cool system. New languages (Java and Drools), Service Oriented Architecture, high volume traffic. But not novel.
Dynamic Case Management is "new", vendors say, because the problems being tackled are complicated. They are more complex than what traditional BPM addresses. True enough. They involve ambiguous logic, varying responsibilities and need to integrate multiple perspectives. Yes, yes, and yes - that's why we solved them with Blackboards twenty years ago, after doing BPM twenty-two years ago.
