BPM provides unified design environment

Business process management (BPM) suites provide a unified design environment that hides the complexity of combining human workflow, application integration, business rules, and transaction management within a single executable design.

The benefits this provides over treating these process components as independent entities in the enterprise architecture stack are a common data model and common state management over the entire end-to-end process, says Newsfactor Magazine.

Proponents tout lower application development costs, shorter time to market, improved compliance enforcement, and new points of leverage for optimising business performance.

Imaging technology has come a long way since the first systems were used to scan bitmap images of paper documents back in the mid-80s, reports Line56.com.

Since then, this formerly discrete technology has combined with electronic document management and workflow/BPM to address more complex and distributed environments as its emphasis has increasingly focused on business automation and processing.

Driven by the stringent demands of regulatory compliance, government mandates for the implementation of electronic health records, and the need for enhanced BPM, document imaging has largely fulfilled the vision of its pioneering technologists.

Not so long ago, BPM vendors could afford to specialise. Now they`re moving as fast as they can to bring the spheres of collaborative workflow and system-centric processes together.

One vendor cooking up a complete BPM stew is Appian, whose solution combines human-oriented document management and collaboration capabilities with a services-oriented, event-driven architecture for weaving enterprise systems into process flows.

According to TMCNet, Appian Enterprise 5, which shipped last week, brings a long list of improvements stretching from easy configuration of exception-friendly processes to integration with Microsoft Outlook.