Business Process Management Report

The majority of interest in BPM is currently coming from the financial sector, with insurance and banking the primary users of BPM-related technology at the moment. In the financial services arena, issues such as Straight-Through Processing (STP) and next-day settlement are forcing major re-evaluations of existing processes, and this is likely to be a further driver in the BPM direction. Manufacturing organisations are becoming increasingly interested, particularly in the e-commerce channel. Vendors are beginning to find that it is the business users that tend to be the ones preparing the case, rather than the IT manager.

The BPM market contains a large number of players, and is an immature market in Butler Groups opinion. There is plenty of room for growth in the market, although we foresee increased consolidation as large integration and middleware vendors continue their current strategy of purchasing Workflow and similar technologies to complement their products. The major players at the moment we see as Staffware, Computer Associates, and IBMIBM, with Savvion and Metastorm as vendors to watch. Computer Sciences Corporation also stands out as an influential provider of BPM services. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

Conclusion

The words Business Process Management are not complicated or difficult to understand, but when put together to describe the functionality of one of ITs latest technology offerings, they have become a real enigma. The vendors clearly understand what they are attempting to achieve from deploying BPM solutions, but as far as the rest of industry and commerce is concerned the message has failed to grab their attention.

The requirement is for processes that are application-agnostic, processes that can seamlessly cross the boundaries between systems and technologies to support the everyday needs of the organisation. BPM as a technology claims this ability through its process-centric approach to developing new information flows, and through its use of open specifications for the management of e-business processes.