BPM in Action

I don’t think I blogged about this research before but if I did, it’s worth repeating.

BEA did a major report on the state of the business process management (BPM) market during December 2007/January 2008. They released it at the time and Oracle has re-released it. One of the advantages of the Oracle acquisition of BEA is that Oracle marketing has a much wider, deeper reach.

Of course if you are regular attendee of the ebizQ webinar series, you already know about it because BEA and IDC’s Maureen Fleming presented the results here on ebizQ in March 2008. And you can still hear a replay if you would like.

I caution you that the research and presentation takes a narrow view of BPM (what I call elsewhere analyzing only “BPM in the name” products). So it doesn’t include traditional workflow products (e.g., EMC Documentum) even though such products often have the same functionality as things with BPM in the name. Most BPM users don’t make that distinction and neither should you if you are considering BPM for the first time.

Maureen Fleming in particular makes the good point that BPM doesn’t “depend on an architecture.” That’s my point about BPM being a value proposition, not a technology. It's all about doing whatever it takes to improve business processes. BEA’s Carilu Dietrich’s points out how BPM helps in “Bridging people” (see slide in the webinar). That is the key reason you need to be thinking about BPM if you have not already begun a project.

My recent article here on ebizQ contains some interesting case studies if you want a less statistical, more qualitative view of how IT users like yourself are ramping up BPM in their enterprises.

-- Dennis Byron