Have you ever been part of a project where the technology choices, design decisions, and even low-level implementation details are determined prior to understanding the project's business goals? BPM engines are like other technologies - they are a tool in your toolkit to solve business problems through IT. It is critical that there is a good understanding of business goals and priorities before implementing solutions. For instance, do you know what is the single most important business driver behind the project? Is it to attract new customers? eliminate/reduce data entry? reduce cycle time across the entire value chain? If your stakeholders cannot agree on this, your BPM project will have a tough time.
BPM projects can help identify and potentially implement service capabilities that can be part of your service inventory. However, do you know the capabilities that are high priority for your business stakeholders? IT can easily implement services that are either tactical in scope or worse irrelevant to business priorities.
Naturally this topic has significant design implications. If you are integrating multiple applications as part of a BPM solution, how will you handle failed transactions/exceptions? Will alerts/notifications need to get generated from the proces flow? if yes, which steps have bottom line impact to the firm and how can mitigation be put in place? how will your existing legacy systems be exposed - will they directly get invoked from the process flow or go through a mediation layer? Is the business process facing internal or external customers? will your in-house staff need to pick-up and complete partially completed process instances? Now all these questions are extremely relevant - but without understanding the business goals you won't be able to invest design effort.
