AAMAS 2004 – Panel on Business Process
Management
Tom Wagner, Ph.D.
DARPA / IPTO
twagner@darpa.mil
BPM
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Disclaimer – not to be confused with fact…
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Broad space / BPM may involve a bundle of ideas:
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BPM = business process awareness + management.
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Human task/workflow management.
Information flows, e.g., auto-magic information exchange to support human work.
Union of that space -- human work management + information management.
Progression of focus for practitioners: transaction processing (data in), then business intelligence
(information from your data), to process awareness and management.
Many different slants driven by different areas of commercial interest:
Process-centric workflow.
Optimization, what-ifs, dynamic
task management.
Information management.
Enterprise applications.
Software infrastructure.
Others.
Not drawn to scale.
Axis unknown.
Tom Wagner – AAMAS04
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BPM and Agents
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Sidebar: standards
– BPMI – business process management initiative. www.bpmi.org
 Nonprofit company w/goal to setup standards.
 E.g., BPML (meta biz process modeling language) or BPMN (graphical representations of BPML).
– Others: BPEL (“bee pell”) web services + biz proc (MS, IBM, BEA, SAP). UML (OMG) =
component view.
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Why agents? Places to hook arguments for:
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Distribution – large scale, privacy concerns between different companies, etc.
Lose coupling – integrating heterogeneous systems and people in dynamic setting.
Autonomy – efficiency value proposition (automation makes things faster).
Choice – important for dealing with humans (also mixed initiatives).
 Process may also have choices that need to be made locally.
– Intelligence – pushing autonomy from simple data triggered action to complex task
performance or complex analysis.
– Adaptive, dynamic, flexible, etc.
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Stumbling block for (some) agents: explicit representations of processes.
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Commercial folks have the same problem ( template libraries).
Implies look to domains with documented processes.
But often existing models will lack features, e.g., choice nodes, parallelism.
May not be an issue -- depends on your BPM vision and how near term you are operating.
Tom Wagner – AAMAS04
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Make Your Own Custom BPM Vision
As a researcher…
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How you approach BPM is dependent on your needs and goals.
• Select a subset (of that space) and clearly define the subset.
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Consider being complimentary to (but not competing with) commercial interests.
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Shoot high / offer a new capability that dovetails with where they are going.
Hard to compete with development or near term work.
Research: learning to adjust
workflow models.
Commercial: Process-centric workflow.
Research: distributed dynamic human
activity coordination in RT environment.
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If you need external investment / are working for “real world” impact:
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Parallel application spaces, e.g., military.
Or know your customer. Voice-of-customer should modulate:
• Your argument for an agent approach (why distributed, etc.).
• Your value proposition.
• Potentially your long term technical vision.
You decide the balance of customer voice versus research vision.
Most value propositions will include efficiency improvements (faster, cheaper).
Tom Wagner – AAMAS04
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Why I like BPM as an Application Domain
(Unsure about being “the” killer ap)
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Amenable to “agent” solutions.
Two ways to motivate investment:
1. A product for sale.
2. Internal use / not for sale.
 All companies, agencies, universities, etc., can improve efficiency of processes.
 Potentially cheaper / smaller barriers.
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Some version of the problem space is probably accessible to you.
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The problem exists today:
– You will be proposing new solution to a known (and familiar) problem.
 Les Gasser’s anecdote
– i.e., not developing both a new product and a new market.
Markets
Products
Current
New
Current
New
initial state
current product,
current market.
current product,
new market.
new product,
current market.
new product,
new market.
yes
Ansoff’s Product-Market Expansion Grid
Tom Wagner – AAMAS04
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Process-centric Workflow
Agents vs More Conventional Approaches
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Gross categorizations – probably ranges of things.
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*If* conventional workflow is often:
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Centralized.
Complete / global information.
Top-down – tasks are put at human effectors.
Monolithic / fully integrated.
Tending toward static.
An agent approach might be:
– Distributed (implies scalable, implies ability to span enterprises).
– Able to operate with partial information.
– Blend top-down (direction from management) with bottom-up (performers inputting
preferences, choices, and tasks themselves).
– Loosely coupled (easier to integrate heterogeneous systems).
– Tending toward dynamic / adaptive.
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For the predictability question – if you can get a customer to ask that question,
they are already interested in your vision. (You have to generate your own actual
response to that question.)
Tom Wagner – AAMAS04
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Funding Your Custom BPM Vision
Incremental Investment / Payoff
Problem: research is expensive, payoffs are uncertain,
takes a long time to make anything happen.
Hypothetical vision: intelligent
systems, stupid systems, and humans
that work together both within an
enterprise and across enterprises.
Research
Cost
Incremental
investment.
Hypothetical waypoint: centralized management
of tasks of two humans who always work on
related process / have activities that interact.
Catch-22: You still have to shoot high or they don’t
need you.
n
.5
Project Years
Tom Wagner – AAMAS04
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