BPMS vendors often compete head-to-head when the customer knows they are looking for a BPMS technology. Most of the time, however, the primary competition of a BPMS technology is custom-coded solution or a point solution (Six Sigma tools, SOX tools, CRM, order management systems, etc). Too often, configured BPMS technologies are bucketed with custom-coded solutions in the preliminary mind of the customer.....and they instinctively-gravitate towards a point solution because it's more comfortable (after all, the product was pre-built to do what I need it to do).

The myth I'd like to debunk is that point solutions are less disruptive, faster to deploy and better choices than BPMS technologies. Given the opportunity to compete, BPMS technologies are typically a better fit for most companies than point solutions. Why?

1. You'll be doing customization work no matter which path you go down. At least with a BPMS tool, you'll be avoiding the "fun" task of changing the way people work and instead configuring the application with an emphasis on user adoption and ease-of-use.
2. Point solutions aren't all-encompassing....meaning that there will be people and steps that need to play an important role in a point solution process that won't have access to the application. BPMS tools are application-independent and "connect the dots" between all of the people and all of the systems that play an important role in a process. Take CRM for example. Clearly, they are valuable to the front office, but you can't manage a customer relationship entirely inside of a CRM tool. Other people (who do not have access to CRM and never will) play an important role. And, most of the customer acquisition processes I have run into involve many other departments who have their own systems for the role they play in the process.
3. Point solutions are hardcoded, even after they are customized. Unless nothing changes in the way you do business, your system will be out of date frequently and you'll be spending a lot of resources updating it all of the time. BPMS tools give you far more agility to keep your solutions current.
4. Why buy one system when you can buy dozens? What I mean by this is once you have a BPMS tool paid for to address the "pain point" you purchased it for, you can reuse the application to create a limitless number of other solutions.

2007 saw a huge uptick in BPMS awareness, but we're still not there. To be clear, I am not saying that point solutions don't have a place.......they clearly do. What I am saying is that often, they are the wrong choice and even when they are not, customers who choose them will get far more out of them when augmented by a BPMS technology.

Maureen Fleming of IDC put out a BPMS market report last week that told of a market that continues to experience rapid growth that hasn’t even begun to hit its stride yet. IDC reported 2006 BPMS revenue to be

$890 million and they see the market growing to $5.5 billion in 2011......a 44% five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR). They attribute the growth to the fact that most BPMS deployments (even inside the Fortune 5,000) are not yet enterprise-wide, rather departmental deployments and that those companies will eventually get there. That is consistent with the way most of our customers purchase.

Also worthy of note is the growing share of Microsoft-based BPMS technologies. As the report puts it, "more BPMS software was sold for the Windows operating environment in 2006 than for any other. Given the prevalence of people-centric process automation projects, it is not surprising to see Windows as a strong choice.

The report covers 27 vendors and it doesn’t seem like that long ago that the analysts were talking about over 110 in the space. Given the fact that IDC still refers to BPMS technologies as people-centric and Forrester still puts out its Waves human-centric, integration-centric & document-centric, I don’t believe we’ll see the majority of BPMS demand for an all-encompassing BPMS software for at least 4 - 6 years........coinciding with enterprise-wide adoption of BPMS (as IDC predicts to happen in 2011).

I’ll leave this blog entry pointing out 2 interesting changes in how the analysts have begun reporting on the BPMS market this year.....

#1: IDC, Aberdeen and Forrester (we’ll see about Gartner whose Magic Quadrant is due out later this year) have all embraced the breakout of BPMS technologies into human-centric, integration-centric and document-centric. Forrester still calls out a 4th bucket called decision-centric but I still struggle to see that as a separate type of BPMS technology. They haven’t put out a Wave on that type of BPMS technology anyway.

#2: Forrester has broken out their human-centric BPMS Wave into J2EE (just out) and .Net (to be released in November 2007). While Web Services and SOA render platform less significant, there are still customers with platform preferences out there and BPMS technologies that still require coding. Thus, this breakout is highly-relevant to much, although not all, of the market.

Last week at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced a new intitiative entitled Office Business Applications. In short, OBAs (as they're called) are custom-configured line of business applications based on the 2007 Office Business Platform. While few would endorse replacing "mission critical" systems with this approach, it is unquestionably the right approach when it comes to structuring collaboration around desktop tools people already have and already know how to use. What's new in Office 2007 that takes this idea to the next level is ability to leverage Office Open XML in conjunction with BPMS/workflow technologies for such things as forms-based workflow, data-repurposing (taking ERP data and dynamically-populating an Excel template) and content-based routing.

You can read more about it at the OBA web site: www.obacentral.com

When you live and breathe process, you start to look at daily interactions as a step in a process.I was at Newark airport on Friday (that was my first mistake) and my interactions with the airline seem to be a disguised as a scream for process help.There’s no need to call out the airline by name because experiences with all airlines these days tend to be the same:

• Overworked, understaffed, underinformed employees
• Archaic systems or a mix of legacy and brand new systems that don’t talk to each other

It seems to me an opportunity for BPMS.....if for nothing else than the effective dissemination of information to employees and passengers. Most of my travel angst is not stemmed from the delays. its from the lack of information. Its the airline agent telling me the flight is on time when we’re 10 minutes from scheduled departure and the engine of my plane is half taken apart. We both know the plane isn’t leaving on time, but I can’t take alternative action until the airline makes it officially delayed or cancelled.

BPMS can’t do anything about the weather nor can it do anything about a plane’s maintenance issue. What it can do, however, is streamline information to put everyone in the best position to quickly resolve an issue. Since I am well versed in BPMS capabilities, I tend to ask myself questions like:

1. Why isn’t information updated instantly the moment it changes (on the board, at the ticketing counter, at the gate, at the call center)?
2. Why can’t I be updated the second something changes to my phone or my email instead of being forced to wait in line or on hold for the most current information?
3. Why doesn’t information on delays automatically initiate an airline "load leveling" process that gets more employees to the airport ASAP?
4. Why can’t cancellations automatically kick off a process that puts every traveler in a hotel, on a rebooked flight and/or provided with a meal voucher as a default.....instead of making everyone stand in line and begin at square one. People could update their airline profiles with a "should I get stuck overnight due to non-weather related cancellation, a) putting me ina hotel automatically is fine, b) booking me a car rental to drive home is fine, c) do nothing and wait for my instruction.
5. Why can’t "crisis management" processes kick off that automatically provide airline agents at the airport with the authority they need to address the situation.

As with all things in life, it wouldn’t be this simple......but simply fixing information flow would do wonders, wouldn’t it?

Colin Teubner from Forrester Research is joining my CTO, Karl Treier, on a Webinar on Wednesday on Process Agility....what it means and how to look for it in a BPMS technology.It is a vendor-sponsored Webcast, but obviously the Forrester content is vendor neutral and highly relevant.

June 20th @ 12PM EDT

Registration Link