On Defining BPM
"BPM is the role (management) assigned to someone or something to plan, organize, monitor, control and execute a set of actions (performed by activities, tasks, services) to produce deliverables required by other units of the organization and/or its customers, in response to requests received for these deliverables. As an IT acronym, it is a "something;" a suite of software that, given a plan (model) of the desired execution, undertakes to control and execute the assigned actions, and to provide feedback on how it is doing."
On How Organizations Should Choose a BPM Product
or Strategy
“As organizations begin to use BPM, their process awareness tends to improve and they begin to see value in previously uninteresting aspects of a process, such as role assignments, “publish and subscribe” approaches to activity initiation, business rules abstraction, security and identity management, document meta-data, collaboration linkages among activities, and the like. What these represent is an increase in perceived complexity (and opportunity) that may not be readily accommodated by specific BPM vendor solutions. Here, the standard trade-off issues exist between initial simplicity and adoption, and longer-term complexity and the ability to accommodate that complexity. No simple answer here.”
On Returns Seen from BPM in Business Terms, and in IT Terms
“I’m not able to ‘expertly’ answer the question as posed. While there is lots of anecdotal evidence, none that I feel is generalizable at this point. Instead, I’ll address the types of returns one should be seeking.
First, at the business level, BPM allows the level of discussion to be elevated to top-of-mind issues of C-level executives such as: agility, market innovation, customer experience, regulatory compliance, acquisition integration, value chain management and outsourcing, in addition to reducing transaction costs for both the customer and the company. BPM has the potential to contribute to each of these, but only if it is explained and viewed that way. I find it more useful, in fact, to talk about services (as delivered to users and clients), rather than processes when discussing strategic impact.  “At the IT level, BPM has the potential to give business users far greater understanding and control of their processes and, in combination with other technologies, such as SOA, to achieve a far greater level of responsiveness to rapidly changing needs. The question will be if IT is willing to enable, and then transfer, such control to business users? I believe there is a major shift in thinking about IT that’s embedded in BPM, namely a shift from application thinking to process (and service) thinking. This can, and should, have significant implications for the role of IT in modern organizations as a technology-enabling partner in the business-driven (and controlled) need for capturing, managing, improving, extending and innovating business processes and the services they deliver.”
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