Business Process Management (BPM) fundamentally changes the way that business users control the technology that supports their day-to-day operational processes. It provides them with the visibility, flexibility, and agility needed to manage the business.
Butler Group defines BPM as the administration of the interactions between different business processes. It is a rules-based cause-and-effect model that defines relationships and manages the result of rule changes both within specific and across related processes. It involves the understanding of each and every resource - what its purpose is, where in the process it acts, how long it acts for, and what effect it has on future actions and resources.
BPM is important because it has the potential to provide businesses with the tools to address many of the systems and legacy-based issues that currently inhibit their ability to develop existing systems and move forward. Fundamentally, BPM should be seen as a technology-based, business-focused, operations methodology. It is a solution for building and maintaining operational processes where the owners, the business users, are endowed with the power to control and manage their own destiny.
However, it is our opinion that, to date, the technology has failed to impress the market with the vision of BPM as a revolutionary solution. We believe that this has been caused by the vendors inability to clarify exactly the role of BPM.
Butler Group believes that BPM, when properly deployed, will enable organisations to hone their processes to meet the challenges of globalisation, convergence, and deregulation. However, it is important to remember that it is people, not computers, who innovate - there is no IT strategy that will in itself give competitive advantage. Butler Group predicts that the BPM market will be worth US$4 billion by 2005.
Business Issues
There are very few green-field systems development opportunities any more. Virtually every company, of any significant size, already has a mass of systems and associated databases in place to support its operational needs. Butler Group believes that many organisations often fall short in their ability to enhance existing solutions in order to face new company challenges when they appear. For most organisations, it is not so much a lack of ability within internal IT departments, although of course there are exceptions. It is more likely to be a lack of flexibility within the existing systems.
There is an urgent need to develop solutions that allow data to be passed between disparate operating systems, manage application-to-application integration, and application-to-human interactions, and BPM is being promoted as the vehicle to achieve this. The key is to provide the ability to respond to change whenever and wherever it occurs. BPM enables business users to adjust to complex business scenarios with a rules-based solution that deals with the issues of the day. BPM also helps increase profitability through productivity improvements, reducing error and cycle times, and the automation, wherever possible, of manual business processes.
It is our view that going down the BPM route provides significant advantages over other similar technologies; Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), or Workflow, to name but three. However, there is a need to have a serious look at the maturity of the BPM business model, and there must be doubts about the ability of organisations like the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) to impose standards upon an industry that has a tendency to go its own way. All of these issues are addressed within this report, and our findings will almost certainly upset a number of established process management vendors, especially those that have positioned themselves within the BPM arena, but in reality have nothing new to offer.
Impact on Business
BPM provides more than just pure process automation, which is why it has a role to play at all levels within an organisation, starting and indeed finishing with the CEO. One of the major complaints that comes out of the boardroom is that, at the highest level, executives suffer from quality of information starvation. To qualify this, what is meant is that, from the CEO downwards, senior management are not able to get sight of the information that they need, when they need it, in the format that they want it in. They are restricted by their own technology, information in quantity is not a problem, but relevancy and quality is.
Real BPM has the potential to provide business benefits at all levels within an organisation, and its focus on taking out processes from individual applications for delivery to business users via a metaprocess, can give the type of flexibility and agility that is needed by all business users. But this of course can only happen if IT vendors can convince the business community of the validity of their case, and spell out the real benefits of BPM, without it sounding like just another technology pitch.
Benefits such as enabling efficient change management by business users so that they are able to build and alter processes dynamically, and react to market conditions, sounds great in principle. But the reality is that IT never managed to do it when they were in control, so selling BPM as the liberator of business will be a good trick, and business professionals may see the introduction of BPM as just another opportunity to throw more work their way. They may also see the technology as a reworking of other timeworn solutions, systems that, at their peak, failed to impress the business community. In principle, they would be wrong, but the reaction would be understandable.
Market Analysis
A recent global survey of telecom equipment manufacturers carried out by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young indicates that more than 40% of executives up to CEO level are looking to flexibility as a key strategic focus. This is in order to take advantage of the upturn in the economy, when it comes, however strong it is. The survey also sees outsourcing becoming even more popular, with cost saving the main reason for its uptake. These results are interesting, in that they imply that technology that will help improve business flexibility and enable the control of outsourced processes, will become of increasing relevance over the coming year.
The majority of interest in BPM is currently coming from the financial sector, with insurance and banking the primary users of BPM-related technology at the moment. In the financial services arena, issues such as Straight-Through Processing (STP) and next-day settlement are forcing major re-evaluations of existing processes, and this is likely to be a further driver in the BPM direction. Manufacturing organisations are becoming increasingly interested, particularly in the e-commerce channel. Vendors are beginning to find that it is the business users that tend to be the ones preparing the case, rather than the IT manager.
The BPM market contains a large number of players, and is an immature market in Butler Groups opinion. There is plenty of room for growth in the market, although we foresee increased consolidation as large integration and middleware vendors continue their current strategy of purchasing Workflow and similar technologies to complement their products. The major players at the moment we see as Staffware, Computer Associates, and IBM, with Savvion and Metastorm as vendors to watch. Computer Sciences Corporation also stands out as an influential provider of BPM services.
Conclusion
The words Business Process Management are not complicated or difficult to understand, but when put together to describe the functionality of one of ITs latest technology offerings, they have become a real enigma. The vendors clearly understand what they are attempting to achieve from deploying BPM solutions, but as far as the rest of industry and commerce is concerned the message has failed to grab their attention.
The requirement is for processes that are application-agnostic, processes that can seamlessly cross the boundaries between systems and technologies to support the everyday needs of the organisation. BPM as a technology claims this ability through its process-centric approach to developing new information flows, and through its use of open specifications for the management of e-business processes.
The vendors promote the technology as having the ability to build processes that can dynamically link disparate legacy systems and databases. This, they claim, delivers the ultimate goal of providing business users with the opportunity to work with and develop solutions that take on a process-oriented, end-to-end, business approach with the flexibility and agility to react to change. Butler Group believes that they are not there yet, but the technology has the potential to succeed.
Der vollständige Bericht kann bei der Butler Group bestellt werden.