Business process management (BPM) systems will have as dramatic an impact on the next 20 years of business computing as relational database management systems have had on the past 15 years.
This is the opinion of Howard Smith, CTO for Computer Sciences Corporation`s (CSC) European operations.
Smith, who was in SA recently and briefed CSC clients on the latest BPM trends, co-authored the book "BPM - The Third Wave", and believes collaborative business strategies have a greater chance of boosting competitive advantage during the next decade if they are supported by BPM, which links processes in the end-to-end activities of entire value chains.
According to Smith, BPM is the act of improving and transforming business processes, and the evolution of BPM, a technology based on the systematic, engineering-based approach to using computers to assist business performance management.
BPM foundation
"The foundation of BPM is solid theoretical computer science, which radically simplifies how business people, not just technicians, can design, implement, adapt, align and optimise the business processes that will enable corporations to gain the double leverage they need to both cut costs and achieve growth," Smith says.
This mathematical basis gives management a clear understanding of how entire business processes can, for the first time, be made self-automating and self-optimising.
Smith says some BPM pilot projects have already achieved impressive results. For example, a US-based property and casualty insurance company reduced claims processing costs by up to 20% and shaved about 60% off the time taken to perform the tasks.
BPM is strong in the insurance industry, but benefits are being reported in the banking, finance, credit card, healthcare, pharmaceutical, government and discrete manufacturing industry sectors as well. In one case, a tenfold reduction in process design to production time and cost was achieved.
Universally understood model
For cross-company collaboration to take place, process models must become the new sharable enterprise data models of the past. BPM implies better visibility, the ability to make changes, improved automation, measurement and analysis.
But, Smith stresses, the key factor is BPM`s ability to focus on the end-to-end business activities of an entire value chain and that requires a universally understood process model.
Currently, he says, companies are stuck with a data-centric view of information technology "in which there is an ever-growing disconnect between the business and the technology it deploys".
BPM is a radical breakthrough in that it makes all business processes directly and immediately executable, without the need to develop software. Smith states that BPM "doesn`t speed up applications development; it obliterates it".
He bases this claim on the fact that BPM is based on mathematical systems that underpin dynamic mobile processes, as opposed to static relational data.
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