The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: A Manifesto

TL;DR

This paper advocates integrating Internet-of-Things (IoT) with Business Process Management (BPM) to enhance IoT application management, discussing potential benefits and challenges of combining these paradigms.

Contribution

It explores the potential integration of IoT and BPM, highlighting the benefits and challenges, and calls for extending BPM methods to better support IoT applications.

Findings

IoT and BPM are currently separate but can be combined for better management.

Challenges include extending BPM to handle IoT-specific complexities.

The integration can improve automation and oversight of IoT systems.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges.