A decade of business process management conferences: Personal reflections on a developing discipline

Abstract

The Business Process Management (BPM) conference series celebrates its tenth anniversary. This is a nice opportunity to reflect on a decade of BPM research. This paper describes the history of the conference series, enumerates twenty typical BPM use cases, and identifies six key BPM concerns: process modeling languages, process enactment infrastructures, process model analysis, process mining, process flexibility, and process reuse. Although BPM matured as a research discipline, there are still various important open problems. Moreover, despite the broad interest in BPM, the adoption of state-of-the-art results by software vendors, consultants, and end-users leaves much to be desired. Hence, the BPM discipline should not shy away from the key challenges and set clear targets for the next decade. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.