A Measure of Success

As BPM continues its journey towards process perfection, Business Management talks to Maureen Fleming, Program Director for IDC’s Business Process Automation and Deployment service, about recent market developments.

As IT managers strive to improve business processes, BPM solutions are being catapulted into the limelight. The ability to swiftly change processes and adapt to shifting demands and requirements could give companies a much-needed competitive advantage, and it’s no surprise that 2007 was another successful year for BPM with AMR research reporting a nine percent rise in spending to US$23.8 billion.

IDC analyst Maureen Fleming categorises BPM into different, conceptually linked groups. “The first of these is people-centric automation,” she says. “This is task-oriented, increasingly collaborative and informational. Deployment patterns in this market centre around approval-centric processes, on-boarding, call centres, case management and task automation. Because real-time information is such a driving force in the selection of a people-centric BPM suite, these environments have shifted to an event-driven (real-time) architecture. And because integration is becoming increasingly important, they have also updated to a service-oriented approach.”

The second group she categorises as transaction-centric automation. “These suites are model-driven,” she says. “Deployment patterns involve the automation of work in high-volume production environments for billing systems, manufacturing and other back-office processes.” The final, emerging type of process automation is what Fleming refers to as sense-and-respond systems. “These identify problems and opportunities that kick off either people-centric or system-centric processes. They are classified as a separate process automation type because, while they are model-driven and process-oriented, the underlying technology is entirely different.”

Technology trends

There are also a number of technology trends that will be influencing BPM product offerings and purchasing decisions. Fleming highlights how two process automation camps have developed. The first of these is blue collar, or prescriptive process automation. “Process automation is very ‘assembly line’ oriented, with well-defined workflow and a goal of minimising deviations in the way the work is accomplished while also minimising exceptions,” she explains. “Expense reporting, employee onboarding, lending and straight-through processing are examples of this. In this case, it isn’t that blue collar workers are doing the work, it is simply that process efficiency – or an assembly line approach to performing work – works the best.”

The second of these trends is white collar, or dynamic process automation. “In this case, there is a need to keep track of work, to keep track of workers doing the work and measure the performance of the outcome of the work. However, the actual activities are highly variable, resources required are variable, workflow is unpredictable and there may be a need to collaborate in order to accomplish a task or to make a decision. Examples include different types of investigations, project-oriented activities and managing exceptions.”

In light of these two differences, Fleming identifies how a key technology trend is being able to support both of these camps. “When enterprises begin to look at BPM suites, they frequently think about the assembly line form of process automation. However, some organisations realise that they need the second form. Most enterprises actually need both, and that will definitely affect vendor selection.”

BPM roadmap

Fleming expects to see the BPM roadmap develop and converge and complement adjacent markets. She explains that business process automation is another way to build a custom application, where the application happens to be process-centric. “We expect any vendor that has a platform that allows an enterprise to develop custom applications will need to add process automation to their product offering,” she predicts.

In addition to this, Fleming expects to see some convergence of BPM with business intelligence, analytics and also rules engines. “As a matter of fact,” she explains, “some enterprises we talk to believe the most important selection point of a BPM suite is the rules engine or the ability of a BPM suite to integrate with a preferred rules engine. Of course, other enterprises are looking for ways to simplify how rules are handled. But the point is, this is a strong point of convergence.”

The convergence of BPM and SOA can result in business agility, therefore it’s no surprise that many organisations are bringing these two together in order to drive improved performance. “BPM and SOA are complementary,” highlights Fleming. “Most BPM suites are also services-oriented. Because SOA tooling can compose, there is some inherent workflow within a SOA suite. That may be why people are confused about the competitive nature of BPM and SOA. Enterprises that have invested in services-enabling their various systems will find it fairly straightforward to shift to process automation using a BPMS, primarily because the BPMS is able to consume a services created with SOA tooling and receive events coming in from a bus supporting publish-and-subscribe message types.”

According to Fleming, how integration is handled for any type of custom application is a decision that is based on the tradeoff between performance and adaptability.

“It isn’t that the use of a BPMS enhances the position of an ESB or vice versa, it is more that there are always choices made based on these tradeoffs. Were a vendor able to figure out how to use the two in combination in a high volume environment with no performance degradation, that would enhance the value of both.”

Future growth and challenges

IDC predicts two key challenges up until 2011. The first of these is the lack of portability across BPM platforms. “Thinking about process automation as middleware, there is no equivalent of a J2EE application server for process servers and there are a handful of competing standards that will take a long time to iron out,” says Fleming. “That is not such a problem when an enterprise is doing custom work, but will be a growing problem for enterprises when they mix and match custom and packaged applications built on different process-centric platforms and need to customise and support them all. While enterprises may choose to go with a larger deployment platform vendor, they will loose out on many of the innovative features and dynamic capabilities of the specialised BPMS offerings.”

The second challenge centers around the potential confusion around process automation and process reengineering, as Fleming explains. “We have spoken to enterprises that didn’t understand how they wanted to reengineer their process before they moved to automation. If you don’t know what your process is or should be, you can’t possibly automate it. This problem could cause buyers to go negative on the benefits of BPM.”

Research highlights BPM maturity gaps

According to a recent survey of nearly three hundred executives entitled The State of Business Process Management 2008, major gaps in maturity remain despite growing interest in business process management as an enterprise discipline. “The BPM market continued to develop and expand in 2007 as most enterprises now recognise its strategic potential. More growth is expected in the current year,” says Paul Harmon, executive editor and co-founder of BPTrends, and co-author of the study. “Our research indicates that these organisations are typically more sophisticated in their overall approach to process management.”

Most described BPM as either “a top-down methodology designed to organise, manage and measure the organisation based on the organisation's core processes” (40 percent) or as “a systematic approach to analysing, redesigning, improving and managing a specific process” (29 percent). Consensus also emerged in terms of adoption drivers. Over half the respondents identified the “need to save money by reducing costs and/or improving productivity” (56 percent) and the “need to improve management coordination or organisational responsiveness” (51 percent) as their top two reasons for pursuing BPM.

“Users recognise that BPM is an extended journey and remain committed to making this passage. However, we also found that they’re also seeking greater guidance in terms of education and training that will allow them to accelerate their efforts,” says Celia Wolf, publisher and co-founder of BPTrends, and co-author of the study.