Many organizations today are hampered with legacy infrastructure, monolithic application design, proprietary platforms and “untouchable” code, the result of decades of poor application development practices and over-customization of packaged software solutions. This is driving the trend towards digital automation platforms that support rapid software development in-house, swinging the pendulum from “buy” back to “build” for the automation of core business operations. Although there are single-vendor digital automation platforms available, large enterprises are building their own platforms – which will then support internal application development by distributed teams – rather than starting with a monolithic, proprietary product. With processes and decisions at the heart of automation requirements, BPMS is a core component of these platforms, but a fully-capable digital automation platform needs to be much more than just an augmented BPMS. To provide best-of-breed capabilities, a digital automation platform integrates components from multiple suppliers, with new capabilities being added as the business requirements and technology evolve. Deploying these capabilities in a microservices architecture provides robust yet efficient scalability that’s just not possible in a monolithic platform. Hear about how these trends are developing in the industry, the typical use cases for building a digital automation platform, the components that it is likely to contain, and expected benefits and pitfalls of this approach.

1. Best of Breed
The Case for Building a Business Automation Platform
Using BPMS and Microservices
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2. Businesses need agility (to innovate)
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3. Businesses need scalability (to survive)
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4. Monolithic architecture is the enemy of
agility and scalability
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5. Business automation architecture patterns:
from monolith to microservices
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Monolith SOA iBPMS Microservices

6. Microservices definition, in short
“Loosely coupled
service oriented architecture
with bounded contexts”
- Adrian Cockcroft, AWS VP cloud architecture strategy
(formerly Netflix cloud architect)
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7. What’s in a business automation platform?
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BPMN
CMMNDMN

8. Who uses a BAP?
Technical developers
• Orchestration
• APIs
• Embeddable engines
• Devops
Citizen developers
• Low-code/no-code
applications
• Prototypes
• Models
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9. Monolithic BPMS as a BAP
• Small to mid-sized company
or department
• Commodity core processes in
COTS system (e.g., ERP)
• Not “in the software business”
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10. Who wants you to use a monolithic BAP?
“An iBPMS is a type of
high-productivity
(low-code/no-code)
application development
platform.”
Gartner MQ for iBPMS, 2019
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11. Multi-vendor microservices BAP
• Large company or tech startup
• Core processes are a
competitive differentiator
• Robust development team
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12. Monolithic iBPMS versus microservices BAP:
points to consider
•Application architecture
•Development tooling
•Extensibility and flexibility
•Scalability
•Cost (tools and scaling)
•Lock-in
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13. Getting to the BAP that you need
•Decide which application architecture
patterns to support
•Identify and isolate the monoliths
•Don’t get attached to a specific service
•Expect unexpected scalability
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14. Thanks!
Sandy Kemsley
sandy@kemsleydesign.com
Read my blog at column2.com
Find me on Twitter @skemsley
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