IoT for BPMers. Challenges, Case Studies and Successful Applications

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected and interacting devices (e.g., sensors, actuators) collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. In the last years, we have witnessed an increasing presence of IoT devices in scenarios of the Business Process Management (BPM) domain, which can strongly influence the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots) that execute specific tasks or entire business processes in such environments. While, on the one hand, the IoT can provide many opportunities for improving BPM initiatives, on the other hand, it poses challenges that require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in BPM. This paper discusses how BPM can benefit from IoT, (i) showing which emerging challenges have to be tackled to integrate the IoT technology in a BPM project, and (ii) presenting concrete case studies on process adaptation and habit mining exploiting IoT and addressing the specific challenges posed by IoT itself.