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.

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