What Is Business Process Management and How Does It Work?

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By Genet Cramlet

"Business process management makes companies far more agile."
-- Michael Beckley, Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Strategy, Appian Corp.

Michael Beckley, co-founder and VP of product strategy for business process management vendor Appian Corp., has some straight answers about what BPM is meant to accomplish, how it can benefit your company, and how you can go about evaluating BPM solutions to match your needs.

"Business process management is a method and technology for automating and analyzing how people and systems interact," explained Beckley. "It's a new way to provide visibility into how people and technology need to be coordinated."

Beckley likes to explain BPM in terms of its benefits. One of the critical benefits -- and goals -- of BPM is the ability to see your data in context, as it relates to your business process. BPM is designed to coordinate all of a company's data, helping the company to focus on its processes -- the tasks it needs to accomplish to do business -- instead of working at the lower and less effective level of applications and data.

How does BPM really make this happen? By describing business processes in a computer language such as XML. These process definitions, in conjunction with an intuitive interface such as a flowchart, allow business users to manage and change their processes efficiently. Since the process definition is independent of the underlying applications and data, processes can be adjusted without changing the underlying system, allowing the business greater flexibility and agility. Looking at the idea from the reverse side, changes to the underlying systems need not be a concern for the day-to-day business user. Process definitions act as an overlay across the company's whole network of applications, data and departments, adding a beneficial level of abstraction.

Beckley's example is a bank merger, which usually involves costly and time-consuming integration of the two banks' underlying systems. With its separation of process from application, BPM sidesteps much of the difficulty of integration. First Bank can hand over the responsibility for loan application approvals to Second Bank by changing the BPM definition of its own loan application process: The new process simply routes applications to Second Bank's approval system.

"BPM puts business users more in charge of the system," said Beckley. "It adds the flexibility to deal with exceptions that the programmer didn't foresee." The idea, he said, is that when business users can quickly react to the market by changing the rules of how to interact with customers and vendors, the entire business can be more agile and responsive.

Also, when business users have more influence over the development and maintenance of business processes, their usage and input can be used to align IT with the overall business strategy. This brings us to another major purpose of BPM: "optimizing the business process."

Beckley points out that while today's big company may have departments that are fairly efficient, the coordination between departments is often disjointed, inefficient and divisive. A good BPM system is in the perfect position to perform in-depth, company-wide analysis of your business processes, because it already serves as the management interface for those processes. BPM analyzes not only processes and departments, but also technology and resources, pinpointing which parts of your business can be better coordinated and how. Beckley asserts that "BPM closes the decision-making loop," helping companies make more informed decisions both day-to-day and in the long term.

What are Beckley's recommendations for evaluating BPM solutions? As a first resource, he recommends a Forrester Research Wave BPM report as a rigorous third-party analysis.

"Evaluate in terms of what you are trying to accomplish," he advised, and always keep your specific needs in mind when pursuing or examining component tools like document management, a rules engine, a portal interface, integration capabilities and process analytics.

"Engage in discussions with BPM vendors and get smart about the differences between them" to make sure that the BPM solution you choose can focus properly on your particular needs, he said.

Finally, as a BPM specialist himself, Beckley holds that "Everyone is better served by going to a specialist. You want to work with a company that has solved your problem before."

Useful Links

Appian Corp.
http://www.appian.com

"BPM Software Report: Appian Enterprise"
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c061016a.asp

A Forrester research report on Appian Enterprise BPM suite
http://www.appian.com/Literature/pdfs/ForresterWave_Appian.pdf

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