"BPM suites will be the 'next big thing.'"

The title of this post is a prediction from Gartner and something I fully agree with. The need for Business Process Management (BPM) is nothing new, but the changes in business conditions are driving organizations to respond to market conditions quicker than ever before.

BPM technology platforms utilize business templates (flows that provide 60%-80% functionality) that gives them the ability to respond to the market in a near-real-time fashion. These platforms will compete with traditional application suites, integration suites, and content suites in the future.

Yesterday, I was in a meeting talking about the harvest of one of our core applications. We have worked to get this application off the mainframe (yes you did read that right--mainframe) for some time and it looks like we are finally going to succeed.

As I looked at the architecture and the business problem we are trying to solve, I see it screaming for BPM. The application drives the process management and integration for a lot of our processes, data and applications. It provides the management of the processes to support our business transactions and events from beginning to end of our product life cycle. It also applies the policies and rules needed to support our organization’s business model.

This is the sweet spot of BPM. BPM will also provides us the ability to speed up our execution of data and process through the enterprise and allow us the business agility we need to respond to our customers and market conditions.

Here are some attributes of BPM (according to Gartner):

• BPM runs within the cultural constraints offered by a company
• BPM runs to meet the conflicting goals set by management and optimizes to find the “sweet spot” between them
• BPM considers the contexts that it runs in while meeting stated outcomes
• BPM ideally suggests better operational behavior
• BPM ideally points to better tactics
• BPM runs within tolerated and expected scenarios
• BPM is flexible in a near-real-time fashion.

BPM and BREs (Business Rule Engines) are key elements in an enterprise architecture built for the future. These elements are prevalent in our enterprise architecture. We refer to them as Policy (BRE) and Process (BPM) management. Look for more on this topic soon.