The set of ideas, tools, and techniques that deal with
business processes, known in short as Business Process Management (BPM), has
been around for a couple of decades.
Large-scale ERP and client/server implementations absorb the
attention of IT departments and distract the innovators. The underestimation of
the importance of integration in connecting end-to-end business processes,
coupled with proprietary application architectures, continues to make it
difficult to realize the promise of BPM.
Companies are realizing that functional excellence and
product commoditization are not sufficient to ensure customer centricity and
innovation. Visionary executives consider the set of integrated capabilities
that deal with the full life cycle of business processes as the key to an
accelerated evolution towards process maturity.
Two of the major roadblocks to adopting and implementing BPM
are the lack of understanding of Business Process Management Software, and not
knowing how to get started.
Most important, companies that make a beginning will realize
that BPM's expense and risk are several orders of magnitude lower than
traditional IT development.
In order to support both process improvement and operational
management, it is essential that the various capabilities of BPM form a set of
cohesive tools for modeling, analysis, workflow design, user-interface design,
governance, and metadata.
Business processes originate with the customer, traverse
various functional departments of the company, and flow back to the customer.
In this journey, the processes rely on both systems and people for handling
business transactions.
A true BPM platform handles not only the components of
business engineering such as modeling and analysis, but also the components of
software engineering such as integration, connectivity to existing IT
infrastructure through adapters, and enterprise-class middle ware management.
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