Has BPM delivered on its promises?

By Jurgen Muller, a director of Quintica, the local distributor of the Marval Marval Service Management (MSM) application.

At around the turn of the century, front office processes began to form an integral part of the business process, eliminating the information silos that characterised the 1990s

In line with this change - and for companies to re-engineer their organisational capabilities and businesses needs to accommodate it - many turned to business process management (BPM) solutions to assist them.

BPM solutions promised an alignment in business strategies, faster process cycle times and increased automation of key tasks.

They also promised to close the gaps left by applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), and provide faster, more flexible, less expensive and more business-friendly environments in which to model and change processes.

Have BPM systems lived up to their promises?

As we approach 2006, BPM systems are increasing called upon to address specific, process-centric challenges - such as regulatory compliance, proposal management, strategic sourcing, supplier management and case management.

If they are to meet these challenges and gain broad based approval - there will have to be some collaboration with other, complementary technologies that also address these focal areas.

For example, organisation that use BPM to standardise the management of business processes that span multiple applications and corporate departments, will have to invent or adopt a common 'language' for these entities.

There is a school of thought that believes BPM should be regarded as a generic term to describe the many different paths to managing process improvement.

So, for BPM to meet its obligations, it must begin to embrace other concepts, particularly that of 'service management' as a key discipline within its spectrum.

Service management solutions will help BPM to align IT resources and processes to directly support the most critical business processes.

They are also key to facilitating compliance with government regulations and defined industry best practices.

However, it is argued by many industry watchers, that this does not go far enough in terms of addressing the complex technologies surrounding process and service management and their optimisation.

This is where IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) technology steps in. ITIL goes beyond a set of best practices for running an organisation.

ITIL's use actively forges a bond between IT, management and external customers by offering them a single language and defined channels for communicating with one another.

Organisations that are serious about their process and service improvement programmes are looking at ITIL.

One of the most pressing challenges that many of companies face in their quest to implement BPM technology is the requirement to adopt legacy functionality from the previous era which makes it difficult to deliver fully process integrated business solutions.

From an ITIL point of view, its configuration management database (CMDB) is a critical element in the overall management solution which contains the infrastructure of the organisation.

Change management, configuration management and other process management disciplines are tightly integrated within the ITIL CMDB.

When changes are not efficiently introduced with proper release management, incidents result, which, if not measured and controlled effectively by service level management, could result in substantial financial losses.

Therefore, only the total integration of ITIL with BPM and other processes will allow business to understand and fully appreciate the impact and risks of changes and/or the non-availability of business services at a glance.

If BPM is to deliver on its promises, its protagonists must realise that its real power will only be realised through the integration as well as the management of all business processes - not in a single process or point solution.