Business software has long been used to support key business processes – there is nothing new in this concept. What has changed, though, is the realization that one of the easiest ways for organizations to be competitive, manage costs, be viable, be flexible and responsive, is to understand and improve the structure and execution of their business processes. Through the deployment of process management software, organizations can meet those objectives. This view is globally recognized in both the public sector and in private enterprises around the world – many organizations now acknowledge that organizational processes hold the key to their successful future.

The distinction between business process management (BPM) and workflow technology is what many experts in the industry have been debating in recent years. The debate has fueled the confusion that currently exists in the market. Most technologists and analysts know that the difference is a fine one – if indeed there is one at all. Workflow is concerned with the automation of procedures to achieve, or at least contribute to, an overall business goal, and it is generally limited to routing manual tasks from person to person. While workflow may be manually organized, in practice most workflow is organized in the overall context of IT systems.

What this means is that a workflow management system is essentially a set of development tools that defines, manages and executes workflows through the operation of software, which is driven by a computer representation of the workflow logic. BPM has very similar dynamics at work but it works at a higher level of abstraction so that you can bring together business processes from multiple organizations and systems to form one contiguous and manageable process. BPM software automatically manages the processes themselves, by accessing repositories, applications, and knowledge workers at the appropriate point in the business process. It automates not just the flow of documents, but also actions – such as extracting customer information or adding new information about a customer transaction, and then generating transactions in the multiple systems involved in the business process. BPM technology effectively tracks and orchestrates business processes regardless of who or what performs the business activities.

BPM allows users to automate tasks involving information from multiple systems, with rules to define the sequence in which the tasks are performed, as well as responsibilities, conditions, and other aspects of the process. BPM not only allows a business process to be executed more efficiently, it also provides the tools to measure performance, identify opportunities for improvement, and easily make changes in the processes to act upon those opportunities. In addition to workflow management, BPM also brings to bear technologies such as enterprise application integration, business rules management, business activity monitoring, and process analytics so that organizations can have better visibility into their processes and manage operations more effectively. BPM allows the creation of a process layer that provides a level of process abstraction, and removes the processes from the control of applications. In the same way that middleware has provided an integration abstraction layer, BPM should provide a ‘process abstraction’ layer – called the independent process layer.

With BPM, instead of having each application in charge of a set of processes, and subjugating adjacent applications to drive its processes, the control of the process is taken away from the individual applications, making them equal peers under the control of a BPM layer which is driving the processes, and which delegates tasks or activities to the individual applications according to their strengths.

In order to do this well, BPM software needs to support all the attributes of a business process. For example, it needs to:

• Manage applications in parallel as well as in series
• Manage people-intensive applications both inside and outside the organization
• Be continuous and discrete, and allow processes to change over time