For the USA, flush with cash as a result of tax incentives, 2018 will be a year for impulse-buying of "solutions" to address improperly-defined problems.

I think it’s going to all about ease of adoption. Appian and others are clearly leading the way, and I think customers are following.

Every old is new again. Simple wins.

Inspired by @Karl - For Europe, because of GDPR. See [1]

Thanks,
AS

There a number of interrelated business drivers:

1. BPM enables a link between customer journeys with business services, products and actions
2. BPM enables a fast and easy delivery of business outcomes
3. BPM enables agilty and flexiblity to deal with increasing need for change
4. BPM enables incremental improvement, integration and operational effectiveness
5. BPM allows organizations to converge business functions to create a business multiplier, contextual visisbility and active governance

Search my blog or the Aragon Research Index (links below)

From here (Europe) I see two main buckets of interest:

• Digital transformation initiatives, starting with Customer Experience focus, having to "reach back" into operations and across functional silos to enable seamless customer journeys. This is about gap-filling, typically - think onboarding, administration, servicing, complaints / problem resolution, etc. Also about 'levelling up' websites and apps to pull data through from operations to the CX.
  
• GDPR implementation.
  

Key Business Drivers for BPM Adoption :
• If envisaging an end-to-end Process from a Customer viewpoint (like day-in-a-life of a user or customer journeys) are given due importance compared to lines-of-code (LoC) implemented from a technical front (seeing the business from a technology lens) - then it's time to "thinkBPM" or "betterBPM"(existing Impl.)
• Streamlining & Optimizing existing Business Process loopholes
• New Compliance & Regulatory process changes (as stated above e.g. GDPR)
• Building easily maintainable & configurable processes (demand for low code platform)
• Reduction in Operational Overheads
• Data insight driven Process Enhancement (with enhanced Decisioning for developing Self-Healing Processes)
• Organizations planning to jump on the Digital Transformation Bandwagon! (BPM being is one of the levers to digitalize the processes)
• Another step closer, to bridge the gap between the Business & IT (BPM has been striving to achieve this from the day of inception)

@Pritiman makes a good point with the need to " . . . bridge the gap between the Business and IT".

The gap is the result of a "silo" mentality you might reasonably expect to find within individual business units, but not within IT.

The reason a gap exists within IT (even today) is that many vendor software suites presume that all data must be input via keyboard/mouse. The result is IT is able to buy functionality but not interconnectivity.

For applications that are able to export their data and import data to/from local and remote systems and applications (and this includes platforms that host background BPM) there is no gap PROVIDING you put in place a generic data exchanger.

No organization today is going to allow external apps to directly access database records either for read or write operations, so, in the absence of a data exchanger, you have no way to achieve interconnectivity.

Setup of a data exchanger facility is, yes, tedious, but not "difficult".

Easy, when you allow publishers of data to post and read data using their own native data element names and when you allow subscribers to data to read and re-post data using their own native data element names (i.e. I publish "abc", you want/expect to receive '"def'" and if you enhance and on-publish "def", I want to be able to read your enhanced data as "abc". A second subscriber may be expecting "abc" as "ghi".)

As Yogi Berra probably once said, ". . . when you know how to do it, you know how to do it":

For our region (LATAM), it most likely will be the ease of implementing and later adapting a BPM solution. The price for the acquisition (be it perpetual or subscription based) and maintenance of BPM technologies will be absolutely crucial in that equation, too.
In short, BPM customers here will be shopping for affordable, scalable, easy to use BPM platforms and solutions. Companies are increasingly more open to the idea to also purchase and adapt pre-assembled, vertical processes that they then ran from a cloud based BPMS (process as a service).
Since many of the traditional US BPMS providers have become too expensive for most of local businesses in LATAM, many successful local and European flavors started to appear and will likely continue to flourish during 2018.

Instead of thinking about BPM adoption, think instead about BPM adaptation. What BPM is going to have to adapt to is an increasing and accelerating rate of automation.

The gap between people and the hard coded inflexible silo systems is now being addressed as digital needs to deliver a service rises up the agenda. Whilst this gap was recognised some 20 years ago through the BPM message the ability to deliver on key requirements has failed to reach expectations. This has been exaggerated by the industry analysts failing to do real research in the easy emerging challengers...and the reality that being paid by large dominant vendors and not being fully disclosed has held back emergence of new technologies that support BPM delivery.

The required BPM support to deliver this next generation enterprise digitisation has key attributes which are essential. Adaptive is vital covering the now recognised need to have UI dynamically adapting to the specific user's needs delivering a good and productive experience. Also the need to readily support change in recognition at this dynamic front end of business where change is inevitable. Add to this the greater need to ensure full accountability for compliance and elimination of corruption puts huge pressure on delivery of this approach to enterprise software.

These needs put business as the driving force to deliver and as such this puts emphasis on how software can actually deliver. As recently discussed in this forum the emergence of no/low code opens this door but to deliver this does require the UIs to be intrinsically linked to all the supporting back office functions not least of which is orchestration of legacy as required thus closing that "gap" and putting business in control of their operational business processes. The capability now exists and the real challenge is how the message is conveyed to business. How the industry analysts react working for end users not vendors without disclosure could accelerate the move but it is when not if.....

I sound like a broken record already:

Value
This is the only thing that will drive further adoption, really - BPM needs to expand into small and mid market via affordable pricing models and competent patterns that reliably solve insufficiently described business needs.

Easier said than done - to support affordable prices, you need a radically different business model: from go-to market partnership model, technology cost, cloud shopping, automation of development and delivery pipeline, platform architecture to support customizations etc.

Getting there.

Bogdan raise some very relevant issues on "value". We and I am sure others have now proven the cost to build and maintain the next generation BPM no low code solutions are a fraction of the old ways and this opens up different distribution models. The no low code platforms should be under control of the business allowing confidence to future needs for change. Operational frontline process are real assets but only if that change is supported therefore ownership is important and the new delivery models need to reflect this. This will see the delivery costs seen as an asset and as for any other assets sale by lease payments over a number of years with be possible thus eliminating lock future "costs" and flexibility to change infrastructure delivery suppliers which could be independently outsourced. This will see new partnership models emerge delivering greater flexibility for business control of costs. This will significantly impact the current supply chain? This does indeed bring a new dimension to "the go to market partnership model". Sharing of the core no low code supporting software becomes attractive and will ensure a dynamic global development with continuation of the evolution of this paradigm shift for enterprise software sitting outside the control of a few dominant vendors.....?