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BPM
is a category of software that exploits the middleware IT infrastructure,
providing organizations with an opportunity to bridge the existing
technology with people and business processes. This opportunity offers
line-of-business managers the ability to streamline operations and reduce
costs. As companies look for ways to make operations more dynamic and
responsive across organizations and their extended value chain, an
emphasis on process-driven integration and process-based improvements
rises in significance. The result of this drive is a heightened industry
interest in BPM as a unique technology offering.
It's
not a question of whether your company should use BPM technology, but when
your company will use BPM. BPM technologies will be in high demand in
2004. As companies move out of the IT expense rationalization exercise of
the last tow years, they will seek ways to improve business processes
without completely replacing existing software, putting BPM on the high
priority list.
A business performance management system becomes the pulse of an
organization and has significant cultural implications. Developing a well-articulated change strategy with a central focus
on outcomes and benefits must be part of any BPM initiative.
BPM evolved from a technical tool to an all-penetrating strategic
direction in business use of IT. This area of technology, which is broad and, at times, confusing, has important
industry implications.
Like business activity monitoring elsewhere, powerful BPM is the
prize that enterprises earn for their investment in application
integration. Every enterprise will go through this process, but those that
see it sooner and invest a greater commitment will become the industry
leaders. Creative and agile management of information will emerge as a
distinct characteristic of industry leaders, just as creative and powerful
management of financial assets has always distinguished leaders in the
past.
The implementation of business process management (BPM) solutions
has emerged as a key strategy that organizations are adopting with
increasing frequency to improve the effectiveness of their core business
processes.
Meta
Group says 85 percent of respondents to its recent business performance
management (BPM) survey indicated that they will have a BPM solution
underway within the next 18 months. Just 15 percent indicated they had no
plans for BPM. Meta Group defines BPM is an integrated management approach
that includes Web-based analytical applications (to gather and analyze
data), business plans to achieve desired metrics and the necessary
reporting and forecasting to ensure performance goals.
Standards
bodies and software vendors are putting the final touches on a number
of Web-services specifications that could revolutionize the way companies
collaborate. While the technology that underlies each of the new specs
marks up data similarly to XML, its capabilities go far beyond that of
XML. "This
(BPEL) is something weird and different," says Howard Smith, CTO
at Computer Sciences Corp. Europe. It's not Web services, it's not
the reinvention of workflow, it's not process-management workflow, it's
new. It unifies those things. It's like taking the best of every other
paradigm and building a nice new model. This stuff is what's going
to lead to a significant acceleration of the way we invent and deploy
processes." Information Week 11/2002
What's going on now is a paradigm shift in the way we design applications, "says Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO of Siebel Systems
is basically the next generation of computing languages. It's a very exciting idea. It's not too soon to think about the technology...This is breakthrough stuff, but in four years, five years, it's going to seem real obvious."
Enterprises should begin to take advantage of explicitly defined processes. By 2005, at least 90 percent of large enterprises will have BPM in their enterprise nervous system (0.9 probability). Enterprises that continue to hard-code all flow control, or insist on manual process steps and do not incorporate
BPM's benefits, will lose out to competitors that adopt BPM.
Through 2008, BPM suites that package agile business processes with light
integration will effectively compete with other technology suites
(0.7 probability). Gartner
recommends that business and IT architects consider BPM suites for quick
time-to-market of BPM benefits. In the long run, embracing the business
process first will drive the need for deeper integration and content
management. BPM suites usually have some business process analysis (BPA),
strong BPM, light integration (heavy integration is usually provided by
commodity integration brokers and adapter vendors), business rule engines
(BREs) and built-in business activity monitoring (BAM).
For the
Fortune 2000 companies, the quest to implement the best business process
management (BPM) solution is becoming highly desirable akin to acquiring
the holy grail in any given industry. BPM promises to streamline
internal and external business processes, eliminate redundancies, and
increase automation.
Businesses
need to constantly adapt their processes, yet they are often held back
by static IT systems that aren't designed to exploit future opportunities.
Business process management is a new change management and systems implementation
methodology that overcomes this problem. |
