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BPM explained

MM: Would you explain for a moment what you mean by BPM? Perhaps get into a little of its history.

IG: Sure. Absolutely. The acronym BPM — in the sense that it’s used today — meaning “business process management,” was, I believe, created in 2000. I think we were one of the very few companies and authors to use that acronym at that point. Prior to that, it was being used to refer to business process modeling or some variance of business process reengineering.

Really, this new wave of BPM is the use of technology to bridge the gap between business and IT. It enables corporations and governments to be a lot more agile in their management of complex business processes that tend to be more and more regulated, say, in the overall governance risk-management and compliance issues that large issues are faced with today. They tend to change quite often, and you’re faced with the challenge of implementing that change in the organization.

There are business issues, as well as technical issues. The idea of the BPM system or the business process platforms is to bring IT and business together — to give them the same tools — and a common language to describe the business requirements and very rapidly turn them into active systems — systems of action. Then, to enable the business to make changes to them very rapidly without having to go through the traditional IT development processes that companies had to go through before.

Legacy in business process reengineering

MM: Ismael — part of the legacy of BPM lies in business process reengineering. Usually it has been a buzzword or a moniker to describe putting in some sort of enterprise content-management and workflow-management system. Then, usually in the process of that, rationalizing or documenting some business logic by which these workers collaborate and interact. Is that a fair characterization?

IG: I think it’s a very fair characterization of what happened in the market, and the bastardization of the BPM acronym or the concept for BPM. Essentially, that acronym became a little bit too popular — it was very hyped. Many different vendors came either from the traditional workflow automation space or from business flow vendors — or document-management system vendors. They banded together and called everything BPM.

My take on that is that if BPM is everything, then maybe it’s not really anything.

Our view of BPM — our unique take on it — is that it’s a much more radical technology. Maybe for the first time, it’s giving to the enterprise a single tool — and a single way of representing processes and systems and the way people work that is usable both by the business people and by the IT people.

I could not think of any other tools — and I’m talking about a back-end development tool that would be usable by people who are fairly technical and also by people who are not technical at all.

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