• What is BPM?


• Can I see a quick example?


• What does BPM provide that other enterprise applications do not?


• How does BPM fit in with legacy, ERP and other enterprise systems?


• What kinds of processes are typically the best candidates for BPM?


• It seems like everyone is selling BPM—what does the BPM vendor landscape look like?


• How is BPM related to service-oriented architecture (SOA)?


• Are there any standards being developed for BPM?


• What does BPM cost? What are the hidden costs?


• What is involved in implementing BPM?


• How do companies organize their BPM projects? Who should own a BPM initiative, business or IT?


• How do I build a business case for BPM?


• How do I measure and actually get ROI from a BPM project?

What does BPM provide that other enterprise applications do not?

BPM suites are integrated toolkits for building and managing tailored solutions based on a company's unique business processes. Other enterprise applications typically consist of prebuilt functionality, such as a human resource management application, with some capability to tailor the base functionality through configuration options. This usually means that companies implementing an enterprise application must choose between accepting the vendor's prebuilt business process behavior or paying the vendor to make expensive modifications that make upgrades costly or impossible. In contrast, BPM enables a company to cost-effectively and quickly model and change its business processes to meet the specific needs of the business.

Some enterprise applications have introduced workflow capability into their products to give users some ability to control the process behavior of documents such as an invoice or an engineering specification. BPM goes beyond traditional workflow applications in two ways. First, most enterprise application workflow is implemented through code. This means that programmers must develop and maintain it. BPM uses graphical process modeling tools that enable business users and business analysts—those most familiar with the process—to implement and manage the process definition. Second, workflow of the typical enterprise application is generally limited to document or task routing. BPM enhances workflow routing by providing an integrated capability to include rich user interfaces, system integration, rule processing (the rules necessary to determine which path you should take next in a process that has multiple paths—for example, an order less than $500 does not need manager approval, but over that amount it does) and event handling (for example, steps necessary after a product recall: "Pull from shelves" notification must be sent to the chain of stores).

BPM is often used to integrate multiple enterprise applications and various internal and external users into a new process. Enterprise application integration products help you move data between applications; BPM adds interaction with people and the ability to support long-lived processes. People are involved in two ways:

• From a worker point of view. BPM represents units of work from the business process as tasks; each task contains work instructions, status, priority, due date and other attributes. Workers use BPM to monitor and execute the tasks that are assigned to them or to the workgroup to which they belong.

• From a manager or executive point of view. Managers and executives use BPM to monitor process performance by viewing graphical reports that summarize task status and alert them to process bottlenecks. They also frequently get involved with tasks by participating in approval or escalation process steps.

Many BPM products provide real-time insight into the process operation. The process-flow model of BPM allows management the ability not only to easily identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the process, but also to more easily modify the process to improve productivity.

How does BPM fit in with legacy, ERP and other enterprise systems?

One of the strengths of many BPM products is ease of integration with other applications. Many enterprise applications are monolithic, focusing on solving a specific set of problems and making interaction or data sharing with other applications difficult or impossible. This often makes BPM an ideal approach for automating processes that require information from multiple enterprise applications. Facilitating the flow of information among these legacy systems can often provide significant productivity improvements.

Once it became clear that ERP systems were going to be a big piece of the enterprise systems puzzle but not the entire picture, middleware vendors emerged to help solve some of the vexing system-to-system integration issues. What remained were perhaps the hardest automation challenges of all: processes that changed and/or involved multiple subsystems, external processes and systems beyond your control, and perhaps most challenging—people.

BPM can be thought of as an integration layer that automates processes, includes legacy and other systems, and coaches users through the new process. Just as a typical business process (like introducing a new product) involves multiple functional areas, BPM integrates these areas and the existing systems that support them.

If you have already SOA-enabled your legacy systems, then BPM can move very quickly to address your process problems. If you do not have SOA or a middleware platform, then BPM will typically require custom integration to the necessary systems and data. The need for custom integration is usually not a barrier to BPM, since many modern applications have defined application program interfaces (APIs) or, if not, support direct-to-database integration using SQL.

BPM suites can also be used to build composite applications—that is, adapt a point solution bought by one department for a specific purpose for use by other departments. BPM acts as an umbrella, defines processes and uses system-integration capabilities without awareness or inconvenience on the user's part. A composite application recombines functionality from a variety of existing sources within an SOA for a new service. Using BPM to build composite applications can provide functionality that would otherwise be too costly or risky to obtain by modifying the existing applications.