With as many as 170 BPM suppliers, choosing the right
approach is vital when looking to improve efficiency through
process-driven IT
Organisations increasingly regard their IT infrastructures as a
series of systems to support operational business processes. To
drive down cost and improve the management and speed of business
change, they need to break these IT systems down into standard,
adaptable and reusable building-block components at each stage of
an end-to-end business process.
The pursuit of such business agility through IT optimisation has
led to the emergence of software dedicated to aligning these
processes with the IT systems that serve them. This, in turn, has
spawned an approach to IT management that looks on technology as an
enabler, underpinning business processes with a service oriented
architecture (SOA) approach.
Both concepts are designed to join up IT components in a way
that business, as well as IT users, can understand and manipulate
on the fly and in real time.
The growing business process management (BPM) software market
that has emerged to meet these needs is populated by a number of
suppliers with different approaches to solving the same
problems.
Jim Sinur, Gartner vice-president and BPM analyst, said, “BPM is
the second fastest growing software market and is part of an
architectural revolution in terms of IT and business
management.”
Gartner estimates the BPM software market to be worth £750m in
terms of licence and maintenance revenue during 2006, which is
comparable to the markets for financial compliance or business
intelligence systems. Gartner said there are as many as 170 BPM
suppliers, with 17 top performing or innovative suppliers marked
out as relevant to large enterprises.
A BPM system makes the rules and services normally embedded in
IT components leveragable and serviceable by the business. Gartner
also believes BPM is needed for developing an SOA.
“An SOA approach needs BPM, but BPM does not necessarily need
SOA. The basic building blocks of a BPM system or approach for
configuring IT infrastructure components in support of specific
business processes are real-time business activity monitoring,
events management, and business process modelling and simulation
tools,” said Sinur.
Sinur said BPM systems tend to take one of two approaches. The
main platform providers offer system-to-system activity. The
alternative is the human workflow method, where work is ushered
through human-to-human activity and generally includes some form of
data or content management system.
Generally, the larger platform providers will offer middleware
technology to orchestrate how and when systems talk to each other.
Microsoft, for example, sells its Biztalk product, and IBM offers
Websphere.
Microsoft takes the suite approach to BPM, where the most
central point from which to implement BPM would be to have a
process server. The process server is used both for connecting
systems and for centralising the processes of the business.
Gavin King, BPM product solutions marketing manager at
Microsoft, said his firm’s BPM strategy benefits from the ubiquity
of its desktop products, along with its .net development
framework.
“Suites offer several advantages over the pure-play proposition,
because of strong cohesion between tools, simplified development
processes, ease-of-use and familiar business user packages,” King
said.
Other major suppliers have gained BPM functionality through
acquisition. One example is IBM’s recent takeover of enterprise
content management supplier FileNet to help it improve how business
intelligence and business processes integrate.
IBM’s main differentiator is its component modeller – a tool
linking SOA and BPM. David Henderson, technology strategy partner
at IBM, said, “A component view, as opposed to a process view,
helps organisations to look at processes through different lenses
to discover what areas a business needs to either be good at or
commoditise because it is not part of their core competence.”
Tibco also approaches BPM from an SOA perspective. It builds on
an SOA platform and does system-to-system integration. The company
has also added human-to-human capability with its acquisition of
workflow supplier Staffware.
Tibco is moving towards the use of BPM to predict problems and
bottlenecks before they occur. Vivek Ranadivé, chief executive at
Tibco, said, “Predictive business allows companies to take
real-time events and correlate them with historical patterns to
accurately and consistently predict their futures.”
On the technology front, Ranadivé said the core IT components
of a predictive business model include an event-driven
infrastructure using an enterprise messaging service, application
integration with an SOA approach, and a decision engine based on
rules or analytics software.
Another option for IT directors is to consider tools that aim to
embrace the concept of BPM holistically. The argument for this
approach is that if you start from a business process design
perspective, you allow business people to use familiar languages
and create blueprints that can then be used to deliver competitive
advantage.
This is basically how Bob Farrell, chief executive at BPM
provider Metastorm, has tried to engineer his company’s
product.
Alternatively, IT directors can buy products that aim to
tackle
BPM from a business goals perspective. The idea here is to avoid
having to buy integration tools to align human tasks with
associated IT processes.
For instance, companies have traditionally used business
intelligence and datawarehousing tools to marry the task to the
process.
Phil Gilbert, chief technology officer at supplier Lombardi,
said, “Our view of BPM is into the visibility of an organisation’s
process instances and tasks in the context of its goals. It is not
just delivering efficiencies through workflow improvement, but is
giving the business people visibility of associated tasks.”
Some products, such as Ilog, use the concept of a business rules
engine. Alain Gendre, BPM and SOA programme manager at Ilog, said,
“An essential element for the implementation of efficient, flexible
and compliant business processes is a business rules management
system to make routine decisions and create policies that are
transparent and auditable, to improve compliance and reduce
operational cost,” he said.
BPM is primarily a business management philosophy about people
and the processes by which they work together, as well the
performance objectives that underpin their work. At the same time,
it is about the technology they use to make all that visible.
Whether you decide to address your integration needs and
operational performance through a human- or a systems-led approach,
Sinur urges organisations not to be afraid of taking on third-party
help or establishing a process centre of excellence to identify the
key processes that need improving for maximum agility and
return.
“Look for modelling capabilities with strong links to simulation
and execution engines that have rules management capabilities to
affect processes in flight,” he said.
“Round-trip, iterative BPM is best, allowing for simulation,
execution, reporting and continual adaptation of processes to suit
rapidly changing business models and needs.”
Whatever BPM approach you take, the question is how to get
started. Derek Miers, independent industry analyst and BPM report
author, said, “The trick is to find a small project that can be
highly impactful and delivered in 90 days or less. That way, you
get the business behind you with the ‘wow’ factor.”
He suggested that IT directors identify the 30% to 40% of
functionality that gives the business the biggest bang for its
buck, and take an iterative approach according to that focus.
“Work out where the functionality lies in your IT infrastructure
and make you technology choice with that as your guide.”
Insolvency service uses BPM for growing
workload
The UK government department that administers and investigates
insolvency cases has recently invested in business process
management (BPM) software. The Insolvency Service, an agency of the
Department of Trade & Industry, plans to put the software at
the heart of an SOA-led process re‑engineering project.
Allan Cook, change programme manager at the Insolvency Service,
said, “We are faced with a situation where the number of insolvency
cases we process is going up, increasing workloads for our staff.
They process a lot of raw case data, and the BPM investment will
help them be more efficient and, at the same time, reduce the total
cost of ownership for the supporting IT.”
The new IT infrastructure will initially save the agency’s
insolvency practitioners from having to find data buried in legacy
applications and cumbersome spreadsheets. Instead, it will present
them with task-based workloads via a single-interface browser that
takes them through each process in a logical, simplified way.
Cook said, “We decided to decouple as much of our IT
architecture as we could and went for an SOA strategy with a BPM
approach, and an enterprise service bus at its heart.”
In order to separate legacy IT systems from the processes they
support, the service opted to build new, streamlined processes
alongside corresponding data management principles using the
Teamworks BPM software suite from supplier Lombardi and IBM’s
Websphere enterprise service bus.
“We are not in the business of building software, and we wanted
to move away from bespoking systems and concentrate on
configuration instead,” said Cook. “We are very much describing the
processes in the BPM tool and using that tool to put them into
production to increase our speed of change, as well as reduce risk
and cost.
“It will help us to both automate better processes and join them
all up, so our users have easier access to the common data
underpinning them as well.”
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