B2Bi Technologies: BPM
Business Process Management (BPM) was one of the hottest technology categories in 2005, and for good reason. For many organisations, BPM holds the key to transformational business change - at a time when many need this more than ever before.
Approached thoughtfully, BPM offers organisations unprecedented productivity and cost efficiency gains by standardising and improving the way business processes are managed.
Its biggest impact can be seen when BPM is applied to complex processes that span more than one department, location or even company. Typically, these processes will be supported by a range of different teams of people and software applications.
Get it right, and BPM can accelerate your achievement of key strategic goals, including:
- Regulatory compliance – with Sarbanes-Oxley and other key legal and industry-specific requirements
- Enhanced business agility and market responsiveness
- Superior productivity
- Greater cost efficiency
- Improved customer service
- A sharper competitive edge
- And, ultimately, strong revenue, profit and market share growth
Yet, traditionally, achieving effective BPM has not been easy, with the result that many projects have failed.
There are two main reasons for this:
First, organisations have made the mistake of thinking BPM is primarily an IT-related discipline. They have neglected to explore the extent to which existing business processes need to be rethought, or the potential impact of any changes on the people involved.
Second, the whole area of BPM has been confusing and complex. Terminology has varied from one supplier to another, and the onus has been on the project manager to pull together software tools from a number of different sources in pursuit of optimal business process and application integration. Without independent, external help, projects have soon become unstuck.
There are two major lessons to be learnt from this:
- That real, transformational change can be achieved only by tackling business and IT issues hand in hand, through a partnership involving both business and IT decision makers.
- That working with individual pure-play integration tools vendors is unlikely to reduce the complexity of BPM. It may be far more productive to work with an independent consultancy or systems integrator that understands your business, your market and your organisation’s broader needs, and that can implement a complete BPM solution.
Fortunately, taking a more cohesive, holistic approach to BPM is becoming much easier, thanks to the way the supporting technology has evolved.
Where, once, organisations had to grapple with the difference between Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), middleware, process modelling and supplier enablement, and how all of these confusing technologies fit together, complete BPM ‘suites’ now exist, enabling rapid deployment.