You have to go back a few years ,when technology brought the promise of unified platforms by integrating complex systems of an IT landscape. The idea was to provide a pre-integrated solution to these and to provide a out of the box workflows to handle organizations business process, which was the next big thing at that time obviously for the IT to keep up with the business demand. This idea transformed to what many people know as ERP , and ofcourse this came at the expense of time/money/training and inability to alter the pre-built processes according to the business, inevitably the business had to adjust the way the processes was built/customized in these systems. When I say customization that also came with a lot of restrictions and increase in time to deploy… anyways result - putting IT ahead of business. Also the implementation of ERP is expensive and it obviously was not an option for small and mid size business. I have nothing against ERP, certainly it has it own advantages but should not be considered as a BPM platform.
So next pain point was how do IT keep up with the business changes and needs, as we all know the only constant thing in business is change. Enter BPM!, promising ofcourse business to take control of their processes, products and services. This is not easy thing, ofcourse my other sections in this site will provide you information what to look for in a BPM product… but if you are a C level executive please understand BPM is a not magic wand for bad business processes or the way to redesign company operations overnight. Those of us managing complex IT systems that tie into these business processes know that BPM can’t fix bad practices with the wave of a magic wand. This is a religion if practiced can provide you the right results. Small steps is what is needed for kicking off a BPM project, identify the one that is easy to implement and provides decent value to business is good starting point for a BPM project. I will also talk about that in more details in my other blogs. ( BPM is about to change, Getting started with Business Process Management)
So BPM is about translating your core business processes (that adds value to the bottom line) into executable,traceable, measurable and changeable when needed.
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