Is BPM a True COTS Tool?

Wikipedia defines COTS as follows:

Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) is a term for software or hardware, generally technology or computer products, that are ready-made and available for sale, lease, or license to the general public. They are often used as alternatives to in-house developments or one-off government-funded developments.

The use of COTS is being mandated across many government and business programs, as they may offer significant savings in procurement and maintenance. However, since COTS software specifications are written by external sources, government agencies are sometimes wary of these products because they fear that future changes to the product will not be under their control.

The motivation for using COTS components is that they will reduce overall system development costs and involve less development time because the components can be bought instead of being developed from scratch.

COTS
BPM clearly falls into the COTS category from a number of perspectives. First of all, it is software that is ready made and can be instantly used to create working processes. What makes BPM unique is that there is a low barrier to entry in that it has a pretty low learning curve for IT professionals, and in most cases business analysts can make headway pretty quickly.

Secondly, BPM is engineered to be agile. One can create a process application that can change in near real time, assuming a fast change control path is provided administratively. Thirdly, BPM can dynamically orchestrate pre-built templates and services leveraging service oriented architecture. (See blog article Can BPM Based Templates Compete with COTS Applications? )

Process templates are jump-start processes that can deliver a core best practice for a particular business focus. An example for local government would be the onsite management of building permits or building inspections. An example for all government levels would be the management of constituent correspondence and/or the management of delegated tasks.

SOA provides for the assembly and leverage of reusable portions of code, composite flows and sequential process patterns in a COTS tool in order to leverage off the shelf portions of a process (a process snippet) and/or application components. An example for local government would be a reusable code portion for determining if a vehicle license is truly paid and up to date. All government levels could use an identity authorization service assuming interconnected state systems and/or a national identity card and/or an iris scan authorization.

Bottom Line:

BPM technology is readily available to buy, templates are emerging and services are becoming more commercially available from a number of sources. Software as a service promises to deliver even more availability. BPM has many dimensions of COTS behavior that go above and beyond the simple definition of ready made software for purchase, but it is certainly COTS at heart.

Cross-posted from www.global360.com/blog