As a general rule functionality is more important than presentation. But for BPM, advanced visualization techniques are intrinsically part of the function, helping users to analyze modeling and communicate process models.

BPM: Don't forget the user [source EAIJournal]

Most IT departments expect business process management and integration tasks to expand -- hence the search for news ways to streamline management functions.

Process plays [source Infoworld and IDC]

Infinity Pharmaceuticals has what some companies would consider the IT panacea. The 1-year-old drug discovery company has built its entire company architecture on the Microsoft .Net platform; all applications have been designed with Web services as the fundamental architecture. As such, the Boston-based company has a library of componentized business processes that can be reused to build applications in a matter of minutes.

Linking up process pieces [source Infoworld]

As enterprise processes become more automated, and more interconnected, one piece of technology refuses to go away: the human being. As a result, workflow systems, which handle processes involving human input, have begun to play a larger role in the world of BPM (business process management).

Workflow engines, originally used for document-and people-intensive tasks such as processing insurance claims, are now moving into the mainstream, getting incorporated into most major BPM offerings, which must increasingly handle processes involving both computers and people.

Workflow meets BPM [source Infoworld]

What has surprised everyone in the past few years is how challenging it has been to actually conduct e-business. One of the reasons is that companies have found it difficult to manage their business processes, especially when those stretch across multiple companies, countries, software applications, and systems. But that is about to change. It must change, because shareholders still expect companies to fulfill the promise of e-business. Companies are under pressure to perform better, faster, to do more with less, and to be super-pleasing to customers. This means changing the way they manage their business processes, allowing them to innovate around their own strategic processes, while simultaneously collaborating with partners and customers.

Making Business Processes Manageable [source Internet World]

BOSTON, MA - March 7, 2002 - Aberdeen Group, a leading provider of technology market consulting and research, states that the Business Process Management (BPM) and the integration software market will represent a $16.7 billion market opportunity by 2005. Addressing this growing market is the new Aberdeen Market Viewpoint, Business Process Management: an Emerging Category of Software. This Aberdeen Market Viewpoint sizes the BPM segment of this market, describes the business value derived from deploying BPM solutions, differentiates this technology category from other integration segments, and presents the market forces that are driving the adoption of BPM across specific vertical segments. Suppliers and the vertical segments they target are also presented.

Research Practice Director Darcy Fowkes says, "This category of software may arguably provide the greatest return on investment compared to any other category of software available on the market today. BPM gives organizations the ability to cut operational costs at a time when the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult to boost revenues. BPM defines, enables, and manages the exchange of enterprise information through the semantics of a business process view that incorporates employees, customers, partners, applications, and databases."

Business Process Management and the Integration Software Market to Become a $16.7 Billion Opportunity by 2005 [source Aberdeen Group]

What's exciting is that BPM tools used by business systems analysts will be integrated with those used by application developers. Business analysts will be able to leverage the work of application developers to integrate applications by linking components of software. But most IT organizations are completely unprepared. IT organizations have blurred data and business process logic to the point where they can't tell where one begins and the other ends. That's why, in the short term, the best thing to do is hire people who have studied ontology, which Webster's defines as "a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relationships of being."

Ontology and the revenge of the [BPM] systems analyst [source Infoworld]

A series of eight articles about BPM by David McGoveran, published over the period Jan 2001 to August 2001.

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [source EAIJournal]

Delphi’s BPM Market Milestone Reports combine research conducted with both technology vendors and end-users. The BPM report is a view of technology sectors, including spending habits, growth areas, customer needs, and vendor solutions. The only true “killer app” is that which provides greater value from existing software assets. The scrutiny of IT buyers centers on the investments that will cut out the fat, speed their processes, and allow them to do more with less. This means the ability to collapse the business process by capturing and dynamically managing business logic with integrated application services. Every organization is looking for optimal leverage of IT resources, how to connect business processes with business partners, and how to integrate process knowledge within the business desktop.

BPM 2002 - Market Milestone Report (02/20/2002) [source Delphi Group]

Jeanne Baker is the director of BPI development for Sterling Commerce, a director of BPMI.org and a faculty member of expoQ, ebizQ's new virtual tradeshow for e-business integration. In this white paper, she explains process-oriented middleware, how it differs from other integration approaches and how it can benefit an organization.

Simplifying IT with Process-Oriented Middleware [source ebizq and Sterling Commerce]

Hurwitz Group has identified 10 elements that must be at the core of a strong BPM solution. Enterprises should look for them when choosing a solution. Senior management may be prepared to quickly change business processes, but often the IT infrastructure cannot keep pace with change. Both business and IT management will benefit from a flexible software solution for managing business processes. BPM is a strategic proposition, so enterprises should understand fundamentals of available solutions. The following is a checklist of the key BPM requirements.

Ten Pillars of BPM [source EAIJournal and Hurwitz Group]

Business process automation is what e-business is all about. The essence of an "electronically" powered business is its ability to streamline operations, making information available where and when it's needed, thus increasing customer satisfaction and improving efficiency and effectiveness. However, implementing a solution for automating business processes presents significant difficulties at the business and technical levels.

Through the years, enterprises have adopted various means for automating processes, from hand-coding a solution to using integration products and middleware technologies. The key characteristics for each of these solutions are that they are proprietary, expensive and complex. Additionally, they require a lot of time and a high skill set in order to succeed in an integration initiative.

Revolutionizing Process Automation with Web Services [source Attunity and ebizq.net]

In the context of integration, a business process refers to any multistep activity that manipulates data or business logic from multiple systems. Business process integration (BPI), on the other hand, is typically described as the ability to automate entire business processes within the enterprise as well as with suppliers, partners and customers.

This industry definition is straightforward enough, but it doesn't address questions that frequently come up in discussions of BPI. For example, are other integration technologies a prerequisite for BPI? And, if so, how does BPI differ from or complement other integration technologies?

Simplifying the Integration Market: BPI Is Here to Stay [source Metaserver and ebizq.net]

Tampa -- Q-Link Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) software, has shipped Q-Link 4.0, establishing a new benchmark for rapid process automation by providing the fastest and most complete solution for developing, integrating and deploying scalable, web-based business applications. With Q-Link companies can significantly increase productivity and collaboration, integrate their processes with customers and suppliers, and re-claim business agility lost in the deployment of rigid enterprise applications (e.g. ERP,CRM).

"One of the biggest challenges companies face today is resolving the disconnect between their desired business processes and the capabilities of their existing enterprise systems," explained Steven Horwitz, Q-Link CEO. "in most cases, this gap results in an endless backlog of IT projects to customize current systems or create new applications that provide the desired functionality. Q-Link solves this problem by enabling companies to run their business the way they need to while leveraging, not replacing the existing technology infrastructure."

Q-Link 4.0 Establishes New Benchmark for Business Process Application Development and Integration

SAN JOSE, Calif. - January 31, 2002 - Fujitsu Software Corporation announced the general availability of two new editions of its INTERSTAGE i-Flow™ business process management engine. i-Flow 5.0 Enterprise Edition and i-Flow 5.0 Advanced Edition meet industry demand for Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) technology-based business process management products that allow the rapid adaptation of internal processes to meet changing business needs. i-Flow is a component of INTERSTAGE, an e-Business infrastructure platform that also includes the INTERSTAGE Application Server.

Fujitsu has extended the architecture of i-Flow 5.0 Enterprise Edition around Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) technology, enabling deployment on several leading application servers, including Fujitsu's INTERSTAGE Application Server 4.0. By embracing EJB technology while continuing support for CORBA and RMI, Fujitsu provides customers the flexibility to deploy i-Flow in any environment, thereby preserving IT investment and avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in.

Fujitsu strengthens its business process management offering with Interstage i-Flow 5.0

Of all the words in the e-business dictionary, none is more overworked today than 'process.' Take the words "business process," and now add any one of the following: 'management;' 'integration;' 'optimization,' 'automation;' 'modeling;' or 'simulation.' All of these combinations have some meaning and historical context, but mainly, they're flung about interchangeably, often by software vendors positioning their products for maximum implications in a business setting.

Lately, two versions, 'business process management' (BPM) and 'business process integration' (BPI) have been getting a lot of air. What are we talking about? "I say it's a solution that gives you end-to-end visibility and control over the contributing parts of a multi-step information request or transaction and those contributing parts could and should include applications, people and partners," says Tyler McDaniel, director at research firm Hurwitz Group. This might include all the steps in an order management or fulfillment process, for example. "That's a big loose framework, but from there, you can drill down into incumbent parts."

What's BPM [source line56]

CSC Research Services have announced a new report on the Emergence of Business Process Management - what it is, why you should consider it and how it is being implemented.

All across the world, firms are under great pressure to perform better and faster, to do more with less, and to be super pleasing to customers. To meet these challenges, firms must do themselves only that which they do well. For everything else they must work with others. Evidence of this imperative is found in the annual CSC survey of IT executives. The number one issue last year, around the world, was connecting electronically with customers, partners and suppliers. However, achieving this connection requires the integration of many internal systems with many external systems. Solving this kind of many-to-many problem, as the Net Markets learned, is hard. Fortunately, recent technical developments have come together that promise a dramatic increase in the ability of organisations to describe, change, and execute business processes, both within the firm and across the networked enterprise. This technology works from the top down, not from the technical details up. The vision is that the business, not IT, will design, deploy and revise business processes. Analogous to the management of business data in a DBMS, we are starting to see a new breed of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that support the management of end-to-end transactional and collaboration processes: discovery, design, deployment, execution, interaction, operation/maintenance, analysis and optimisation. BPM is emerging as a key enabler of collaborative commerce.

BPM is being used today to evaluate, redesign and customise existing core processes and to rapidly integrate processes and applications within and across enterprise boundaries. A key capability is proving to be the ability of these new systems to carry data along with the execution of the process so that metrics are inherent to how work is done, not just clumsy add-on's.

The Emergence of Business Process Management [80 pages]

Process Collaboration is Needed for Value Chains to Work. These new relationships involve companies forming virtual corporations powered by virtual business processes owned not by one company but by the value chain itself. So important are the business needs for process collaboration and agile Business Process Management (BPM) that the OMG is developing new UML modeling standards and BPMI.org is developing an XML-based business process modeling language (BPML).

Process, Process, Process [source Internet World]

All organizations have competition on some level, so they need to follow sound business principles to maintain their base of customers or constituents. As part of this, they incorporate technology to increase efficiency and competitiveness, but they must balance the benefits of technology with accompanying restrictions. For nearly two decades, business and public service organizations have responded to market and constituency demands by embracing a number of efficiency-enhancing tools designed to improve processes and the products delivered by those processes. Each has exhibited shortcomings and inflexibilities that limited their usefulness.
Business process management (BPM) technology is a new approach to efficiency and competitiveness. BPM is designed to extend the capabilities of past business process solutions and overcome their shortcomings for process automation. In this document, BPM is defined and distinguished from its technological predecessors. There also are guidelines on typical BPM features and classifications, as well as technical details on implementations.

The Case for Business Process Management: Driving Efficiencies and Mission Advancement [source ebizq.net author Metastorm]

Despite its track record, reengineering is making its way back into managerial conversations, as Hammer's The Agenda and the re-release of Hammer and Champy's Reengineering the Corporation (HarperBusiness, 2001) attest. The primary reason for the renewed interest is that the current downturn may turn out to be "much steeper than people think," says Thiagarajan, director of investment research at Mellon in San Francisco. But this time around, "cost-cutting alone may not be enough. Wall Street has set growth targets, implicitly or explicitly, that companies must hit to sustain their current stock price." To do that, companies must also find new markets, new sources of revenue. Can the new version of reengineering offer any help here? Today's reengineering—let's call it collaborative reengineering to distinguish it from the early 1990s version—combines the austere method of process reengineering with the pliable, collaborative medium of the Internet in ways that weren't technologically possible a decade ago.

The Return of Reengineering for Recessionary Times [source HBS working knowledge]