BPM in Action

Business process management (BPM) is an analyst’s dream. Because there are a half-dozen different definitions of BPM (workflow, straight-through, and so forth) and two fundamentally different ways to view BPM, users and investors are always looking for advice. And BPM suppliers are always looking for ways to muddy the waters.

Advice and muddying the waters: that’s what us analysts do for a living.

In fact, it hasn’t been this good for analysts since we used to describe the same concept as “business process re-engineering.” That long-forgotten term highlights the two fundamental views I’m talking about: BPM the value proposition vs. BPM products. Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch explained it well in a presentation at the AiiM Conference on March 4. He explained that the first question users need to ask is: Are you looking to analyze your operations or do you simply need some technology? If you confuse the two, you’re likely going to spend too much money and get very little in return, buying the technology before you have done the analysis.

My view is similar but I come at it as a marketing research person as opposed to a pure analyst. I think breadth-and-depth-challenged software suppliers want to make their products differentiated for marketing reasons. So they define BPM from fairly narrow functionality and architectural technology perspectives. For example, it is or it isn’t human-centric; it is based on BPEL or BPML; it is or isn’t service oriented architecture (SOA), and so forth.

On the other hand, users -- working from a real-life point of view -- consider BPM a value proposition. That value can be achieved using many different types of software with various functions and architectures. Which is why Jarrod suggests you ask the business process question first before choosing the technology. For example, everything from Microsoft Project to Houston-based BMC Remedy's ARS to IBM Rational tools can help users manage business processes, not just the products with BPM somewhere in their name and SOA on the first page of the data sheet. It's important to know what business process flow you need to manage before picking the tools.

I'm mostly going to blog here about products with BPM somewhere in their name. In my opinion, they are best for business process flows that cross legal entities. I know from my market research that many of these products are used inside the firewall but that is typically overkill (exception: your comapny is actually the merger of two or more other companies; then using BPM products with BPM somewhere in the name makes sense because you are still treating your IT needs as if you are two separate legal entities.)

But if you have business processes that include customers, suppliers, sales partners and so forth and you want them tied together in a seamless whole, look to the BPM products with BPM somewhere in the name.. If you have a product you'd like me to talk about, send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net and I'll go talk to the guys that make it.

Now, having given you the advice, let me muddy the water.

Do you need a product that works only with selected infrastructure software (e.g., JEE or Microsoft) or products that are neutral as to platform and architecture. Should it be optimized for a certain application set or heterogenous? Is it for high transaction volume or more social computing? SaaS or on premise? Open source or proprietary?

-- Dennis Byron