"The problem is you have these vendors who think it’s their God-given right to have process management inside their products, but they’re not doing anything in a standardized way," says McCoy, who predicts that many companies will have as many as eight different tools that support process management within two years.

To help the situation, numerous BPM and workflow standards have been proposed by various industry groups during the past year. In July, Microsoft, IBM and BEA threw their weight behind BPEL4WS, or Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, an XML-based language for modeling a business process. Other standards include the business process modeling language (BPML) and ebXML (electronic business using extensible markup language).

Analysts say that it will take some time for one dominant standard to emerge, and that in the near term it’s unlikely that a single specification will address all business process standards scenarios, such as internal automation versus business-to-business.

Even with standardization, analysts warn CIOs to pick suppliers carefully and expect industry consolidation. As a sign of things to come, IBM in September acquired longtime partner Holosofx with the goal of integrating Holosofx’s business process modeling and tracking tools with IBM’s MQSeries Workflow and WebSphere application server.

Getting on the Same Page

Considering that most business process modeling in enterprises is done with Microsoft’s Visio diagramming tool, one of the key benefits of BPM is the ability to create a live link between business models and production systems, say analysts and vendors. Having a single business process diagram that both business and IT workers use, either for process modeling or coding, helps drive alignment between business and IT. And once processes are effectively documented and reviewed, businesses gain a lot in process knowledge.

"You’re actually capturing best practices," says Antaki of Shell Oil’s experience with BPM. "So if you have high turnover, new people are coached to perform to the same standard and level as the top person in the organization. You get a productivity improvement."

In fact, BPM advocates say CIOs should measure return of BPM projects not only on reduced cost but on process improvement. "The next level of business enhancement or rate of return is in process. You’ve got to bring about change in the process level," says John Koenigs, president and CEO at Savvion in Santa Clara, Calif. In effect, innovating at the process level makes the CIO a businessperson, says Koenigs.

But despite growing interest, BPM tools still haven’t caught on broadly with end users and business analysts, who ultimately know the most about business processes. Allmerica Financial, an insurance and financial services company in Worcester, Mass., decided to avoid the industrial-strength, back-end process automation offered by many workflow and middleware vendors. Instead, CIO Greg Tranter spent about $50,000 building its first application using a desktop-oriented BPM product from Nobilis Software. He expects subsequent applications will let business users automate and modify their own processes without IT’s involvement.