Business process management aims to take the pain out of process inflexibility
Author: Rethink IT

* In an IT industry renowned for its ubiquitous use mind-boggling jargon, a prime contender for the 'most confusing term' award must be business process management (BPM).

This modish expression means many things to many people and has been appropriated by software vendors of every persuasion to describe their integration offerings in the hope of making them more appealing and getting an early lead in an emerging market.

The problem is, however, that no one supplier currently has an end-to-end BPM product suite and the corporate culture necessary to truly embrace BPM is simply not in place in most organizations.

So what is BPM and why is it provoking so much interest? According to David Metcalfe, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, BPM enables enterprises to "design, execute and optimize cross-functional business processes that incorporate systems, processes and people".

This definition includes hath internal company-specific processes and ones that extend beyond the corporate firewall to enable collaboration with partners, suppliers and customers.

Due to the complexity involved in making this happen, however, BPM technology comprises a raft of very different tools. These range from process modelling, execution, management and measurement offerings to workflow and rules engines, enterprise application integration (EAI) software, portals, performance management and business intelligence applications.