Chapter 5. Business Process Management

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

W. Edwards Deming

Business process management aims to take a top-down view toward solving business problems, solving them at the process level via process orchestration instead of at the data level or application level. This approach is far different from the mainstream technical approach that has been in use throughout all industry verticals for the past decade or more. This new approach is important because enterprise application integration is one of the largest challenges for chief information officers today. A recent CIO magazine poll indicated that enterprise integration software was the most business critical application development initiative for organizations in 2002, beating out customer relationship management applications, security software, enterprise information portal software, enterprise resource planning software, and supply chain management software, respectively. Because business process management takes the top-down, business-oriented approach, it is often a more accurate representation of the original intended business process to be implemented and can help to reduce complexity in terms of application integration requirements.

Traditionally, business processes have been implemented via software as a technical integration issue, connecting systems together in order to complete the required business process. Most business processes span multiple enterprise applications, and the traditional integration approach has been to start connecting applications at the data level or at the application level via application programming interfaces (APIs) or components, using a variety of techniques. These techniques often include custom application development, business-to-business integration servers for interenterprise connectivity, and enterprise application integration products for intraenterprise connectivity. Additional techniques include integration at the presentation layer via "screen-scraping." In some cases, screen-scraping is one of the only ways to integrate with monolithic computing systems since integration at the data level or application level is unavailable due to the proprietary nature of certain legacy systems.

The new approach of business process management aims to put the ownership for creation and management of business processes in the hands of the business community, in addition to the development community within an enterprise. It also takes a holistic view and, in the words of the business process management initiative (BPMI.org), aims to "standardize the management of business processes that span multiple applications, corporate departments, and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet." This holistic view also spans people and technology by covering the human interaction elements within a business process in addition to the machine interaction elements within the process. Business process management therefore differs from workflow and groupware types of applications since it relates to both people-oriented processes and machine-oriented processes. Workflow and groupware have been traditionally aimed solely at people-oriented processes.

Although business process management is still a technology vendor-driven approach to conducting business processes, it is certainly a move in the right direction from the perspective of business users. It helps to abstract the underlying complexity associated with enterprise application integration and helps to keep systems integration discussions and analysis at a business level instead of at a technical integration level. The complexity is still there under the hood, but a top layer is now presented in terms that more closely match the business processes being orchestrated. Thus, one of the benefits of business process management is that it makes it easier for enterprise process owners to re-engineer their business processes by simply rearranging process steps instead of requiring deep technical integration changes.

This chapter will take a look at the market, technology, and strategy behind business process management and will also look at other sections of the business process market, including business process performance management. Business process management is one area of the technology landscape where technology companies selling solutions to businesses are finally starting to convert their focus to a business approach and value proposition that is understandable by business analysts, as opposed to information technology developers.