Letting Go of Control

Keith Swenson, Fujitsu
Agents have been proposed as a new way to provide for better business processes. What evidence exists? This talk define agents, and compare and contrast agents to previous technology trends. Agents promise to distribute the process logic across different owners. With different owners, the agents need additional capabilities to negotiate the interface variances that will necessarily appear. But most important, and possibly most concerning, is that flowing a process through a set of agents means loss of central control on how that process progresses. How can we cope with that?

swensonKeith Swenson is Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu America Inc. He is known for having been a pioneer in collaboration software and web services, and has helped the development of many workflow and BPM standards. He is currently the Chairman of the Workflow Management Coalition. In the past, he led development of collaboration software at MS2, Netscape, Ashton Tate and Fujitsu. In 2004 he was awarded the Marvin L. Manheim Award for outstanding contributions in the field of workflow. His blog is at http://social-biz.org/