BPMI standards. (Management News and Products).

According to Butler Group's new Report 'Business Process Management - Improving Business Efficiency', there is a need to have a serious look at the maturity of the BPM business model, and there must be doubts about the ability of organisations like the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) to impose standards upon an industry, when vendors are causing so much confusion. However, business process management has the potential to provide businesses with the tools to address many of the systems and legacy-based issues that currently inhibit their ability to develop and move forward with existing systems.

According to the report, BPM should he seen as a technology-based, business-focused, operations methodology. It is a solution for building and maintaining operational processes where the owners, the business users, are endowed with the power to control and manage their own IT operations. However, the technology has failed to impress the market with the vision of BPM as a revolutionary solution because the vendors inability to clarify exactly the role of BPM.

Comment:

BPM does have the potential to provide business benefits at all levels within an organisation. Its focus on taking out processes from individual applications for delivery to business users via a metaprocess, can give the type of flexibility and agility that is needed by all business users. But this can only happen if IT vendors can convince the business community of the validity of their case, and spell out the real benefits of BPM, without it sounding like just another technology pitch.

BPM in itself is unlikely to remove the requirement for integration, either now or m the future - it is a part of that need. A key driver is the need for businesses to become easy to do business with, so that their customers choose them rather than the competition. A point to consider is the increase in the use of the browser as the standard tool to interface with any application. Whilst this has great benefits to business in terms of being able to use the technology almost anywhere, even on a wide variety of devices, both desk-based and mobile, it also has some drawbacks in terms of the lack of rich functionality to which PC users in particular have been accustomed. Browser-based applications tend to be less sophisticated in terms of the features available, although things are improving.

Benefits such as enabling efficient change management by business users so that they are able to build and alter processes dynamically, and react to market conditions, sounds great in principle. But the reality is that the IT department never managed to do it when they were in control, so selling BPM as the liberator of business will be a good trick, and business professionals may see the introduction of BPM as just another opportunity to throw more work their way.

The report also contains profiles of leading players in this area including: Hewlett-Packard Company - HIP Process Manager 5.0, IBM - Application Integration with WebSphere, Sterling Commerce - Sterling Workflow Manager, and Fujitsu - i-Flow.

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