BPM: Rhetoric to reality

10 February 2006

Business Process Management (BPM) technology has been such a long time coming that it has largely missed out on the dubious benefits of being heavily hyped.

While one sister technology, web services, has been widely portrayed as truly revolutionary, and another, enterprise application integration (EAI), is often viewed as an essential enabler of modern electronic business, discussions about the merits of BPM have often been guarded.

This may be a historical accident. BPM is a powerful technology that has many evangelical proponents, but it is only over the past two years that it has shown signs of maturity.

The birth of simplicity

There are many reasons why business process management (BPM) systems have been developed, and why the technology is beginning to prove popular. But they mostly boil down to this: IT, in the form of automated systems, has become too difficult, too complicated, and too inflexible.

As the chart shows, every time there is a business change - whether it involves a new partner, a new process, a new application or a re-organisation - it creates a vicious spiral of system changes. And most of these need to be done by expensive experts with detailed knowledge of the systems involved.

But BPM is just one of a wave of new technologies intended to enable businesses to make continual changes without the necessity for large projects, the involvement of many technical specialists, or the commitment of resources. Other new technologies include componentisation, web services and virtualisation.

And that has coincided with a period of unprecedented scepticism among the corporate IT buying community. Wise heads in the supplier community have been careful to ensure that BPM is not discredited by wild claims.

Even so, there is now clearly a build up of excitement and interest around BPM. CSC Research Services, for example, writes in a recent report: "BPM will blow your old business model to bits," arguing that it will enable managers to outsource non-core processes much more easily and to change their business strategies rapidly.

The key to this is that BPM sets out to clearly map and then separate out the processes and the automated workflows from the underlying coded function. From then on, changes can be done by business people, without recourse to programming - a huge cost saver.

Jon Pyke, chief technical strategist for leading vendor Staffware, has warned in the past that BPM does not represent a new paradigm for the IT industry. But equally, he describes an evolving architecture in which just about every business activity, however delivered, is controlled, monitored, and directed from the business process management system.

Other suppliers agree. "BPM is becoming the core of a new architecture that allows companies to actually run their businesses," says Robert Farrell, CEO of Metastorm, a leading BPM supplier.

This new architecture is not all about BPM. Rather, many customers have turned to BPM because it provides an orchestration and control level that is missing from several powerful technologies in their own right - among them web services and J2EE component based applications.

At the same time, BPM is proving popular because it provides a way in which EAI systems can be developed or complemented to handle longer, extended or exceptional processes that involve work done by people, not just systems.

Bringing this discipline to human work is one of the main reasons why BPM is providing a good return on investment. "While no company keeps its knowledge workers on a production line, it should still be evident how BPM enables more efficient utilisation of human resources," says the Delphi Group's BPM analyst, Nathaniel Palmer.

Are customers buying it? Delphi Group, a thought-leader in this area, suggests that this is a $500 million market software market today, with up to $1.5 billion spent on related services. The group also expects this to rise dramatically - by up to 30% each year for the next three years. BPM may be nascent, but it is growing up very quickly.

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