Business Process Management Report

Business Process Management (BPM) fundamentally changes the way that business users control the technology that supports their day-to-day operational processes. It provides them with the visibility, flexibility, and agility needed to manage the business.

Butler Group defines BPM as the administration of the interactions between different business processes. It is a rules-based cause-and-effect model that defines relationships and manages the result of rule changes both within specific and across related processes. It involves the understanding of each and every resource - what its purpose is, where in the process it acts, how long it acts for, and what effect it has on future actions and resources.

BPM is important because it 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 existing systems and move forward. Fundamentally, BPM should be 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 destiny.

However, it is our opinion that, to date, the technology has failed to impress the market with the vision of BPM as a revolutionary solution. We believe that this has been caused by the vendors inability to clarify exactly the role of BPM.

Butler Group believes that BPM, when properly deployed, will enable organisations to hone their processes to meet the challenges of globalisation, convergence, and deregulation. However, it is important to remember that it is people, not computers, who innovate - there is no IT strategy that will in itself give competitive advantage. Butler Group predicts that the BPM market will be worth US$4 billion by 2005.