Business process management (BPM) has dramatic business and technology effects. It provides organizations with the ability to save money, save time, and deliver value through real return on investment (ROI). This paper defines the BPM concept and highlights its importance to an enterprise’s ability to stay competitive and remain agile in a constantly changing global marketplace.
Demand for Improved Business Processes
After several years of heavy investment in technology, many organizations question the capability of IT functions, and the technology vendors and consultants that support them, to deliver the benefits they promise. They are wary of investing more in IT, yet place greater demands on IT, and expect IT to respond faster. The demand for new or improved business processes drives these requirements. Improving customer service, bringing new products to market, and reducing cost inefficiencies all push business processes and their effective management to the top of the priority list. One aspect of the response to these pressures on IT has been a change in the way that organizations are looking to approach process automation. Increasingly, CIOs are looking for a different way of improving business processes, avoiding investment in large, expensive, and risky new application projects that have so often led to disappointment.
What Is BPM?
BPM is about the continuous comprehension and management of business processes that interact with people and systems, both within and across organizations. It is based on the following assumptions:
Business processes are ever-changing and developing.
Processes are interrelated and interdependent.
Processes must flow between multiple organizations and interested parties.
Processes interact with systems and people. Those people can be employees, partners, customers, or suppliers.
BPM and IT
For the IT department, BPM can connect disparate systems, thereby squeezing more value out of current investments. BPM allows IT to future-proof infrastructure so that additions or changes to the system do not require reinvention or significant changes to the business processes. The service-oriented nature of such an infrastructure allows quick development and deployment of new applications and processes. This allows IT to be more responsive to the changing demands of the organization.
Summary Business processes are the lifeblood of any organization. The visibility, efficiency, and effectiveness of these processes enable organizations to exceed their goals and differentiate themselves in a fiercely competitive market. A process-centric approach to BPM delivers value directly to the owners of these business processes. Key to this is the concept of a process layer that is independent of applications and organizational structure. Through this layer, business users can define, manage, and measure their processes. This fundamental capability empowers business people to take direct ownership of their processes without having to defer to IT to implement each and every change.The independent process layer is the point of coordination for islands of automation within a business process. Existing investments in applications and infrastructure can be made to work harder and the anticipated returns on those investments can be realized. What were point solutions can now be made available as services throughout the business, as organizations move to architectures that are more service-oriented.
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