Where Business Process Management Is Now

By Howard N. Smith

Business Process Management is gaining significant momentum in the market. With so many companies looking for better ways to manage their processes and so many vendors claiming to have process management solutions, this is a good time to take stock of the movement.

The focus on business process itself isn’t new. What is new is the role technology plays in changing and managing processes. It’s also what has caused some confusion about definitions and led people to ask how BPM goes beyond systems integration, ERP, or workflow.

IT’s new role in process management

The problem was that the term BPM didn’t emerge from the IT industry. It emerged from the business community that wanted to describe the practice of managing business processes and avoid reengineering’s past association with “downsizing.” Yet it’s the role of IT that is new. It’s what distinguishes the third wave of process management from earlier versions.

The new role of technology, however, has been misunderstood. In the era of reengineering — the second wave of process management — technology was merely an enabler of some piece of a process. The idea that technology should play only a supporting role in process management was typical of Hammer and Champy’s book on reengineering and Davenport’s book on process innovation.

Much pre-BPM technology still plays a supporting role today. ERP provides data and services to support processes, with a module for finance automation, another module for human resources, and so on. Those are also very broad solutions that try to meet everyone’s needs, so they have to be configured and customized for each client.

We now know that we can use technology in a wider sense. We are now using computers not just to be part of processes but to represent, visualize, and execute processes. We’re using technology to continually measure and operate processes, and to redesign and redeploy them. The third wave of BPM occurred when technology and business process became unified around the lifecycle change management of processes.

The genuinely new technology is the business process management system — a universal engine of process that can do all the things we need it to do. The closest solution we had to that idea before BPMS was workflow solutions. But workflow never became the predominant platform for business information management.

Why workflow is not the predominant platform

Whilst recognizing the immense contribution of workflow to many businesses, the workflow platform was incomplete and no one could agree on what it should be. It came as a shock to the workflow community that their engines couldn’t do everything (although some companies still believe they can). Other companies came out with solutions that do more than even the high-end workflow products.

Even in the field of workflow, there is debate about what solutions should and should not support as “standard” workflow process. The lack of agreement made CIOs nervous, so they concluded that workflow wasn’t a platform, but just an application, a point solution. As a result, workflow technology was integrated as a component within other solutions. It wasn’t the main course dinner.

The main course dinner became well-defined relational data management in the field of ERP. Workflow was used within that to provide a human interface. It is the incompleteness of workflow that explains why it did not become the predominant platform for business but merely an application in that platform.

It was that incompleteness that led many of us to start thinking about a BPMS, a new category of technology that would encompass everything we did in traditional computer processing, including workflow, in one unified engine. We wanted to extend the flexibility of workflow management to the whole process, that is, to change processing at will, under business control. Coupled to change management techniques, this could open up the field of reengineering by eliminating IT development delays and aligning practice change with systems change.

Why there are so many approaches to BPM

Several vendors now have BPMS or quasi-BPMS products on the market. That’s a good thing because there are good products available that can be used to develop sophisticated BPM solutions. But it is also a source of confusion because BPM tends to become associated in some people’s minds with particular products.

Each vendor has its own technology, and it is identified with that technology. When a new trend comes along — and BPM is clearly a hot, new trend — vendors want to position their existing technologies as being in the mainstream of the latest new thing. But it is not only about vendors jumping on bandwagons. It is also about vendors genuinely trying to extend their products.

There is now a slew of process solutions on the market. Many of these new products can be integrated into a BPMS or used in conjunction with one. The variety of products makes it possible to devise a variety of solutions.

That may be why more companies are doing BPM, and why there are so many different approaches. The people who do BPM are looking for solutions to very specific problems. It might be low productivity in a particular team, a cycle time problem, or a process that costs too much to execute. ERP solutions are much too broad for such problems, but BPM solutions can support any process to any degree of specificity. As a result, ERP vendors are building a new generation of their products incorporating BPMSs, and starting to tout the benefits on their Web sites. These architectural changes, however, take time. Therefore, many companies with pressing problems are flexing ERP using BPM or are deploying BPM as a new enterprise support system, extending it to many processes.

People have become frustrated by rigid packages that claim to be all things to all organizations. Compromises are rife when packaged software is deployed. Either the company finds it hard to adapt to the package or the package customization required to meet business requirements erodes the business case for change. With BPM, you get the process you want — because the approach makes it ridiculously easy to define the process yourself, and then tune it with experience. You can have a tiny, very specific process or a large, very sophisticated one. Even tiny ones can have enterprisewide impact if they touch everyone who needs to be involved.

What is next for BPMS

Organizations can choose among several combinations of architectures and technologies to pick the solution that is right for them, and the technologies will continue to improve.

We can’t yet tell how the story will play out for BPMS technology, but we are starting to see impacts similar to what happened in the era of computer-aided design. When CAD models went digital, when you could take them through the manufacturing process on the system, you got a thousand-fold increase in productivity, an explosion of new products, and the mass-produced, or mass-customized, consumer society was born. We can see something similar happening with BPMS.

This is the first part of a two-part article. Part 2 will explain how companies deploy process management and will feature some of the reported benefits.

Howard Smith is the chief technology officer for CSC’s European Group. He is the author of two books about business processes, Business Process Management: The Third Wave and IT Doesn’t Matter — Business Processes Do.