I still get the question from customers and partners alike on the difference between business process management (BPM) and workflow. It was raised at the BPM Think Tank in Arlington as well. I`ve found a number of technical definitions from Gartner and a few other experts but none of these could really satisfy my customers and partners.
My take on it is that BPM is about managing a business problem, whereas workflow is a technology. BPM uses workflow as one of its dimensions to manage business processes. The thought of dimensions led me to think of some of the other dimensions of BPM. It also reminded me of the cube as the icon for BPM with its six sides. The six sides of the BPM cube.
* BPM has a human workflow (WF) dimension;
* BPM has a rules engine (RE) dimension;
* BPM has an enterprise application integration (EAI) dimension;
* BPM has a service-oriented architecture (SOA) dimension
* BPM has a content management (CM) dimension; and
* BPM has a business intelligence (BI) dimension.
So if BPM has all these dimensions one can argue that a BPM suite (BPMS) should allow for the configuration of all of the dimensions from one interface or product suite. A BPMS provides the ability to create composite process solutions (CPS) with all of these elements from a single toolset. A typical CPS may be a complex order management cycle (OMC) solution with complex business rules, human intervention, various documents and data integrated to the CRM and ERP solutions in the business. The OMC solution needs to provide operational feedback and notifications to line managers as well as the ability to analyse completed processes and identify opportunities to improve the processes by reducing bottlenecks and redundancy.
A simplified model of the cube would be to integrate RE with WF as well as EAI and CM with SOA. This leaves three dimensions for BPM:
* Rules-based human-centric workflow and process automation [Automate] A
* SOA-based EAI and CM [Integrate] I
* BI-based performance management [Manage] M
Are you AIMing the processes in your organisation? This should be more important than debating workflow vs BPM.
Blog posted on: http://bpms.wordpress.com/.
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