Interview with ProcessMaker CEO, Brian Reale, on Top BPM Skills for 2022

Interview with ProcessMaker CEO, Brian Reale, on the top BPM skills for 2022.  Originally posted on BPMtips.com.

Q: What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

Brian Reale: I tend to like the Gartner concept of the “Composable Business” when thinking about BPM. The idea of monolithic iBPMs suites is basically dead. Sophisticated companies want to use a composable architecture to build around a best in class process orchestration engine. They want to be able to choose their low code front end technologies, their favorite RPA and iPaas vendors, plugin in a best in breed document storage, and use AI/ML in a variety of places. In one word, customers want freedom. I think that BPM practitioners need to embrace this freedom and become well versed in many different plugin technologies.

Q: What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Brian Reale: The best resources are free-trials, online tutorials, and vendor documentation. Practitioners need to test and try before they buy. The absolute best resource for this is Github. Fork some code and implement something yourself. Demand openness from your vendors.

Q: Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Brian Reale: Small data. In other words, you really need big data skills to make sense of where all technology trends are leading today. AI and ML will soon be making most decisions for us in most systems. Practitioners need to really understand these trends and where they are heading.

Q: How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

The real change from COVID is the change to the labor force. The fact is that it is now very difficult to find the right people with the right skills for many types of jobs. As a result, the demand for automation has sky-rocketed. We will look back in 5 years and see that the Great Resignation really was the moment of the Great Start for AI/ML. The one is the exact replacement of the others. We have always talked about AI & ML replacing humans. It makes perfect sense that this really started happening in earnest during the year that all the humans decided to stop working. It is sad, but true.