• 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 cost? What are the hidden costs?

A typical BPM project requires licensing a BPMS from a vendor, training internal staff and hiring outside assistance for your first BPM initiative. Like other software platforms, there are many different types of licenses available: enterprisewide agreements, per processor, per process, per developer, per user, etc.

Now that BPM has gained traction in many large enterprises, BPM vendors are pursuing mid-market companies and reducing license fees to match the budgets of these smaller buyers.

For a typical implementation that leverages a leading BPMS, you should plan for $250,000 to $500,000 to address a meaningful process in your organization. (This cost includes the first two bullets below.)

Potential hidden costs include:

• having to license and deploy multiple development/test/production environments to support multiple BPM initiatives

• additional application and database server licenses

• staff to provide the care and feeding of servers

• internal cost of direct involvement from business users to participate in process modeling, business rule definition, user interface design, testing and rollout activities

• change management and training costs associated with convincing your users to evolve beyond event-driven to task-driven work (event-driven: workers "know" what tasks to do and in which order because that's the way they've always done it; they prioritize their work based on events as they happen, often using the "squeaky wheel rule"; task-driven: the logic built into the BPM solution defines tasks, their order and relative priorities, workers monitor a task list to know what to work on)

What is involved in implementing BPM?

Similar to other software implementations, BPM requires both business and technical resources and activities. Effective BPM is based on an ongoing iterative design/develop/deliver process improvement lifecycle. Although the usual cast of characters will be involved (executive sponsors, project managers, business users, business analysts, technical architects, software engineers, quality assurance and infrastructure specialists), the role they play may be very different with BPM.

In a typical enterprise package implementation, business users are included in up-front planning and requirements definition. After that, they don't typically get involved in a substantial way until user acceptance testing. BPM implementations, on the other hand, will require constant participation from key business users and analysts as process models are developed and supporting application elements are implemented in an iterative fashion. Many business users and IT staff are not used to an ongoing collaborative approach to implementing software; this makes planning, training and change management key components in a successful BPM implementation. (For more on change management, see "ABC: An Introduction to Change Management.")

Another potential challenge with BPM is the behavioral change required by participants in the process. Often, BPM requires users to move from an event-driven to a task-driven work paradigm (event-driven: using the "squeaky wheel rule"; task-driven: the priorities built into the BPM solution determine tasks' order).

For many workers, using a BPM application will involve monitoring an inbox of tasks with prescribed priorities and work instructions, rather than concentrating on the task that seems most pressing. For some organizations, well-planned and executed training is enough to make the transition, but for others, implementing task-driven work processes can require a major cultural transformation.