BPM & Steak: A Great Combo, Part 1

I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Connie Moore, VP & Research Director at Forrester, last week for an invitation-only Executive Roundtable on leveraging Microsoft investments in support of business process management (BPM). The food was great and the discussions even better. I wanted to share some interesting ideas and observations from our event. I will start with some of the key points from Connie’s presentation:

Connie discussed how BPM suites (BPMS) have evolved from two technologies; those that are human-centric coming from traditional document centric workflow and integration-centric BPMS evolving from enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies. She sees continued consolidation in the BPMS market and these two technologies along with their respective strengths coming together and converging.

Connie provided another interesting peak into the future of BPM where she envisions BPMS technologies moving toward self correcting processes. This is an exciting possibility where exception handling and realtime feedback on business process performance can be brought together automatically to make corrections or adjustments to the process on the fly.

Her view of the future based on the continued maturing of technologies that support services oriented architectures (SOA) and the platform software vendors (IBM Microsoft, Oracle) continuing to more tightly integrate BPM and collaborative technologies includes originations enabled to focus on the "whole" process. By using technologies that span the three types of business processes; people, decision, and document intensive processes which in many cases will span across all three can be effectively managed as a continuous process.

In Part 2 of "BPM & Steak: A Great Combo," I will share some of my slides and key points I made regarding supporting BPM by leveraging an investment in Microsoft and Partner technologies. And finally, as a bonus in Part 3 of "BPM & Steak: A Great Combo," I will share my "Top 5 New BPM Features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007."