Of course, seasoned CIOs understand that no single new technology will be a cure-all for complex process issues. It often takes significant effort just to define who owns a process and how it actually works. If a process is bad, automation may only get bad results faster. Like Lacks Valley Stores and Anico, however, a diverse group of companies has achieved real results by leveraging BPM technology in their process improvement efforts.

A New Way to Build and Manage Processes

There is an old story about a clever university planner who waited to pour concrete sidewalks on the new campus until students had worn paths between the buildings. Traditional IT infrastructure has evolved in much the same way: Experienced practitioners now try to thoroughly understand user requirements before deploying automation that can be as intractable as concrete. Conventional approaches to reengineering and application development, however, can no longer meet stakeholder demands for rapid and ongoing process change.

BPM emerged as a response to this "move the sidewalks now" requirement once easier integration technologies finally caught up with management’s ongoing push for operational improvement. Although hundreds of vendors may each define it differently, most agree that BPM gives an organization the ability to define, execute and manage processes that: a) span multiple applications and involve human interactions, and b) handle dynamic process rules and changes, not just simple, static flows.

Software vendors eventually caught on and started providing platforms that integrated process modeling, execution and management reporting of process-specific metrics. Organizations now have the tools to automate and change processes across previously isolated applications, databases and people.

Gartner defines BPM as a structured approach to managing an organization’s process environment and employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools, which today are known as business process management suites (BPMSs). These integrated platforms pave the way for an organization to continually improve a process that was previously inefficient and difficult to manage. They do this by leveraging integration technologies with visual process modeling, real-time monitoring, Web-based applications and management reporting—all working together to support rapid process innovation.

BPMS adoption has spread quickly, in part because of the speed of deployment. Forrester Research estimates that the market for BPMS software is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 20 percent. Between 2005 and 2009, Forrester expects annual sales of BPMS to grow to $2.7 billion.

A Diverse Product Space

Because the promise of BPM is so enticing and the target business problems are so diverse, software vendors have charged into the BPMS market from a variety of backgrounds. Each frames the problem a little differently in order to present its solution in the most appealing light. For example, workflow vendors tend to emphasize the human-to-human aspects of BPM. Middleware and infrastructure vendors focus on the importance of underlying systems integration. Enterprise content management vendors focus on the document-centric nature of processes found in financial services and other back-office operations. BPMS pureplay vendors often highlight their architectural elegance and independence from legacy product and infrastructure constraints.