Delivering business automation with its potential to drive down operating costs has been the key IT goal for more than a quarter of a century. However, after far too many false dawns, we have now reached a stage where nobody believes that the next technology wave will bring with it anything more than limited business benefits and yet more complexity.
For many organizations, in the short-to-medium term at least, the requirement is to get better and more consistent value from their existing technology investments. They are not looking for new enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings, they have already tried customer relationship management (CRM). Those investments have been made, and now what organizations really need is the ability to properly align their systems at a detailed level alongside key business activities, tasks that often sit outside the scope of existing technology solutions.
Of course the requirement to integrate hardwired IT systems has been around for a long time. However, with few exceptions, and despite high levels of spending on integration services, organizations have struggled to deliver end-to-end business solutions that have the flexibility to keep pace with the operational needs of the business, or indeed that have the agility to change when market requirements dictate.
In response to market conditions, perhaps fortunately, or perhaps by design, the BPM sector has matured. Not only has its core process-driven capabilities moved on, but there has also been recognition that process and systems integration have become highly interconnected success factors. Therefore, when used to its full potential, BPM can now be accurately described as a business discipline that utilizes operational practices, approaches, and methods to create and improve business processes.
It is an open technology that can deal with just about any process improvement, discipline, or activity, and with its fast build and deployment methodology would appear to be ideally placed to deal with the automation of manual processes, the linking of disconnected information flows, or for the re-engineering of processes that need to change as business requirements move on. In operational use, BPM is seen as having few distinguishing limitations, and through the use of its process layer architecture it can be used to contribute to most forms of process improvement.
To fully achieve these objectives, and to ensure that new and additional areas of the business can also be properly supported, there is a need to use technology that can deal with both the process and integration issues – one without the other has little value. Therefore, just like the operational-change-and-flexibility-challenges that face the business community on a day-to-day basis, the challenges facing the BPM industry are also moving on.
Yesterday, it was about ensuring that BPM’s process-based role was properly understood. This has been achieved. Today the challenge is about service delivery. BPM in its contemporary form has the capability to provide a complete process delivery model. However, this approach is only practical where both process and integration disciplines exist within a common architecture. In some cases market and product consolidation has helped to ensure that this is achievable, perhaps providing another sign of market maturity in the BPM space.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
