The Business Process Management Scenario

Everyone is being encouraged to get processes right, multipathed, efficient and agile. Agility is being implemented by BPM technologies today, as well as other technologies, but businesses will take advantage of this agility using business activity monitoring and business rule engines in a reactive mode at first, and then evolve to proactive practices.

Eventually, we expect an evolution to a planning mode that plans out contingencies and scenarios using business process analysis tools that can simulate various alternative flows needed to respond to likely conditions. Scenario building may, in turn, allow businesses to have rule packets ready to be installed at the first sign of a scenario. This is a form of real-time enterprise that is proactive in nature. Success will require the spanning of multiple systems and organizations to fuse together processes and supporting technologies.

Caution Signs

Although the expectations for BPM are high, there are ways to fail, and we expect some projects to do just that. The ingredients for failure include, but are not limited to, the following:

What Is BPM Evolving to Technically?

BPM is a composite market and most sectors, to date, have considered BPM characteristics as a feature. A case in point is integration-focused business process management (integrated BPM), which is rated as one of many attributes in the Integration Broker Suite Magic Quadrant. In this Spotlight, we rate the application-independent business process management (business pure-play BPM), which is purely about BPM features.

There will be a major consolidation in the number of pure-play BPM vendors over time, and, eventually, most of the integration players will grow in their competence with BPM. This will cause more "head to head" competition across the BPM sectors identified in the BPM taxonomy. For architects and business professionals to sort out the kind of capabilities they would need in a BPM facility, we would suggest using the requirements that Gartner uses. The requirements documented in "Creating a BPM and Workflow Automation Vendor Checklist" can be used as a "jump start" set of requirements, weighted according to the needs of each enterprise within the two buying centers for BPM: business professionals and architects. To date, we have found more business-led decisions, at a rate of 2-to-1. As a result, we expect more BPM vendors to concentrate on vertical-industry templates and horizontal templates, such as those for Six Sigma and Sarbanes-Oxley legislation compliance, to create differentiation in the marketplace for the business professional. BPM will become crucial for businesses to compete in an increasingly dynamic business climate, so an intimate knowledge of BPM capabilities is a must for the business professional.

Für weitere Informationen wenden Sie sich bitte an Gartner .