"What ends up happening is that business users like to changeunderwriting guidelines very frequently if they see things changing inthe market. This lets them change things on the fly," saysTranter.

Not all companies have technically savvy end users or strong processorientation. Still, companies such as United Surgical Partners aremaking the jump to BPM, in part to make the company's existing staffmore productive but also to understand more about their corporateprocesses. United Surgical Partners' Parker is devising a centralizedBPM application to gather key performance indicators from theunderlying systems and provide alerts or reports to topmanagement.

"We're in a constant process improvement model," says Parker. "If westop improving, we're in trouble."