Executive Summary

Business process management (BPM) promises to help organizations orchestrate their people and systems in order to conduct business more efficiently and effectively. BPM can deliver improved process efficiency as well as better visibility into business operations. Organizations that have invested in BPM methodologies and technologies see rapid return on their investments and derive greater value from their existing systems. In fact, of TIBCO customers responding to a recent survey conducted by Intercai Mondiale:

• 100% increased productivity
• 95% improved quality of service
• 82% reduced operating costs
• 82% saw faster process cycle times

In addition, more than 80% of respondents reduced operating costs and IT costs, increased productivity, and improved their quality of service beyond their expectations.

The results above, while impressive, only scratch the surface of what can be achieved with BPM. Many of these results represent the “low-hanging fruit,” benefits that were realized due to automation of fairly simple processes. In order to extract value from BPM initiatives over the long term, organizations need to be able to model and execute highly complex business processes that evolved in response to a highly unpredictable business climate. This can be difficult to accomplish using traditional BPM approaches that lend themselves better to more static processes and provide visibility only at the highest level of the process. Instead, organizations need to adopt a new approach to building business processes: goal-oriented business process management.

Goal-oriented BPM is an approach that makes the development and identification of business processes a more intuitive and natural activity. It uses familiar organizational concepts such as goals, and the steps taken to achieve those goals (sub-goals), provides granular visibility into sub-goal progress, and allows processes to intelligently change course as events unfold. When managed and deployed appropriately, goal-oriented BPM delivers significant benefits, including:

• Faster, less expensive process creation via process component reuse
• Significant business user engagement in process design
• A better context for process monitoring
• The agility to fix more problems as they occur rather than after the fact
• The ability to dynamically adapt to new business conditions