For business professionals across the globe the core value of BPM remains as a solution for building links and integration bridges between various IT application systems. A new report Business Process Management – Building End-to-end Process Solutions for the Agile Business, just published by Butler Group, Europe's leading IT research organisation, highlights the fact that BPM is often brought in to a business to solve a particular problem or provide facilities in a part of the business operation where there is currently a technology gap or integration shortfall. This approach leaves the value-to-business model for BPM being driven by the technology's ability to allow business professionals – process owners and business analysts – to develop operational processes that accurately reflect their business requirements.
However, according to Andrew Kellett, Butler Group Senior Research Analyst and co-author of the study, before there is an opportunity to be carried away with the benefits package that modern BPM appears to provide, he comments: “There is an underlying requirement to deal with some of the baggage that comes with today's mainstream BPM products. For example, there remain serious divisions between what the vendors see as the most important components within their all-inclusive offerings, and the basic function-driven approaches to BPM – application development, modelling, and integration services – that business users say drive their basic requirements of the technology.
“Furthermore, as the divide between the vendor and business user view of the key elements of BPM appears to be widening, it is interesting to find that many of the latest features which the vendors genuinely feel add value to their product offerings are viewed by the end-user community as little more than lightweight bells-and-whistles.”
Another significant issue that also divides the vendor and user communities is the ‘automation' (the vendor position) versus ‘human workflow' (business analyst vision) disparity that continues to exist. Unfortunately, even today, many BPM vendors still struggle to move away from their entrenched position of seeing BPM as a technology sell, a stance that works to the detriment of human interaction.
Today solutions that operate under the BPM banner have become more functionally inclusive. A constructive and helpful part of this fleshing-out process has involved a consistency of approach across all service delivery components, so that most core elements of mainstream BPM platforms are properly targeted at the business professional rather than the IT technician.
Many of the solutions can be fairly described as end-to-end offerings; taking in process discovery, modelling, simulation, deployment, lifecycle improvement, and ongoing change management. Many also include, as standard, previous extended functionality such as business rules capabilities, business process reporting, alerting, and more recently analysis, plus associated services such as: Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Business Intelligence (BI) functionality.
From a business perspective, one of the oft-promoted benefits of BPM is that it will help remove the functional mismatch that occurs with more traditional development methodologies. This is certainly the case, but it has to be underpinned by a codified structure – which involves bringing together the management of process activities with the rules that underpin their use. Understanding, managing, and aligning the rule element of processes is central to ensuring the success of BPM.
“BPM started out with the clear message that its process-centric approach had the potential to revolutionise the way that business users could interact with manual and technology systems. Automate where appropriate, but essentially focus on the delivery of services where the most efficient combinations of human and technology-driven interactions are brought together for the benefit of all concerned. This, Butler Group continues to see as the primary role of BPM,” says Kellett.
Over the years, vendors have promoted BPM on the basis that it has the ability to link disparate systems dynamically by providing a build methodology that will significantly reduce the need for IT involvement when new processes are required or existing processes need to change.
This, Butler Group believes, is an important point that must be emphasised because history tells us that business differentiators tend not to be driven by all organisations making the same use of standard technology. The real differences and advantages come when the innovative skills of the business community to seek and deliver change can be aligned with the effective use of technology solutions that have the flexibility and ease-of-use to deliver change whenever it is required. Fundamentally Butler Group believes that this is the BPM advantage, but it can only deliver on its full potential when the facilities that the vendors provide fully match up to the requirements of the end users.
“BPM is about business improvement and change management, and a supporting systems implementation methodology that enables business processes to be updated in line with operational requirements”, says Kellett. “It has to be accepted that many business processes will constantly need to change, and processes and their usage will cut across each other. Ultimately information flows between processes will span business as well as departmental boundaries.”
Kellett concludes:
“The ownership and the business knowledge of such processes must remain with the users. Their views of the business world and its operational requirements start out from a very human-centric standpoint. Therefore, in Butler Group's opinion, the way forward for BPM involves getting a better alignment between what the technology vendors think is required, and what the end users are actually looking to do with their BPM solutions.”
