Are They Ready for the Big Thing?

Abstract

Data-driven business processes management (BPM) is regarded as a central future trend because automation often makes huge amounts of data (big data) available for the optimisation and control of workflows. Software manufacturers also use this trend and call their solutions big data applications, even if some features are reminiscent of traditional data management approaches. This chapter derives from the basic definitions of big data including 13 central requirements that a big data BPM solution must meet in order to be described as such. One hundred twenty-one process management solutions are evaluated on the basis of these to determine whether they are real big data applications. As a result, less than 5% of all solutions analysed meet all requirements.