The New Brood of Best-of-Breed

PROCESS MANAGEMENT: ALL THINGS MERGE

Business process management has entered the corporate mainstream, according to a February report from Forrester that found that 60 percent of North American and European companies are already using BPM and about 20 percent plan to do so by 2009.

Maybe so, but for many corporate leaders the discipline's concepts and terminology remain murky. Earlier this year, BPM technology provider Software AG and Wiley Publishing felt the need to publish a book titled BPM Basics for Dummies.

Business process management means different things to different people, notes Paul Harmon, executive editor of Business Process Trends and chief methodologist for BPTrends Associates. Business people tend to use the term broadly to denote methodologies for improving business processes and the coordination of those processes. “If you look at it that way, it's not new — it's the extension of Six Sigma and business process reengineering and a whole collection of things that happened in the past 15 years,” says Harmon. “It's an approach to organizing your business around process.”

Looked at from an IT standpoint, it's a collection of technologies that enable this approach. Full-fledged BPM systems typically include workflow tools, which handle document processing and the flow of data through the company; enterprise application integration (EAI) functionality, which ties together disparate software packages so that they can exchange data; and tools for process modeling, business rules management, task routing, and activity monitoring.

After several years of buying each other, in the past year or so BPM vendors have turned to buying business intelligence (BI) software vendors. And BI, in turn, is converging on business performance management. Eventually, the distinctions will disappear, Harmon thinks. “It'll all go away, because what they all really want to do is to support the business and what gets done.”