I mean, it's so bad, people (including some of us at RFG) had to come up with semi-torturous four-letter acronyms – BPfM for business performance management and BPcM for business process management, for example.
In other venues and instances, people and companies use "BPM" to mean either or both, with frightening little consistency in some cases. (This is why editorial standards and rules can be valuable, even to IT people, who should immediately go out and read the books "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" and "Elements of Style," if they haven't already. But I digress.)
This "alphabet soup" situation indirectly points out an inescapable trend in the markets for both types of BPM solutions – they've converging, and expanding. As I and others around here have written previously, process management solutions alone are inadequate for comprehensive, effective, human-centric management of processes for systems and the people who use and manage them. This means that today's BPM suites, as comprehensive and powerful as they are, increasingly require augmentation to deliver the "big picture" view and holistic management of processes enterprises increasingly realize they need.
Taken together, the "two BPMs," process and performance management, form a critical crucible for the forging of new, integrated approaches to both sets of tasks. Ideally, every IT architecture and infrastructure should be equipped with features, policies, processes, and tools that enable and support management of key business processes across their entire life cycles. Of necessity, this means blurring or eliminating distinctions that currently separate, for example, process management from process optimization, which is another view of performance management. Assuming processes are sufficiently aligned with business goals and needs, of course.
In essence, there are several "task sets" required to constitute comprehensive management of business processes in the modern enterprise. These include, but may not necessarily be limited to, the following.
+ Business knowledge management, my take on what others sometimes call human interaction management (including appropriate harmonization and consolidated management of human-centric and system-centric processes).
+ Business process management (including capture, definition, mapping, prioritization, protection, revision, and storage).
+ Business process performance analysis, assessment, management, optimization, and refinement (based upon rigorous, business-driven, enterprise-specific metrics wherever possible, with said metrics also governed by rigorous processes across their life cycles).
+ An integrated, life cycle approach to managing these and any other critical steps in harmony, for optimal business benefit.
The various interdependencies, specific sub-steps, and other required components will, of course, vary from enterprise to enterprise and situation to situation. However, the above should prove a good, first-pass map of what the "big picture" should look like regarding management and optimization of key business processes.
Does it? What's missing? How's it done where you work, or among your key customers and partners? Let me know. This is a discussion likely to go on for some time, as technologies evolve, vendors consolidate, and business and IT decision-makers figure out more about what their enterprises need to succeed.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
