Those closely watching the BPM space realize that this segment of the market has
evolved over the past ten years from a number of technology precursors, including
workflow, application integration, process automation, and enterprise document
management.
Today, BPM is largely regarded as a discipline combining software capabilities
and business expertise to accelerate process improvement and facilitate business
innovation. Essentially, BPM governs an organization's cross-functional, core
business processes. It helps organizations achieve strategic business objectives
by directing the deployment of resources from across the organization into efficient
processes that create customer value.
The focus on driving overall top- and bottom-line success by integrating verticals
and optimizing core work (such as order to cash, integrated product development,
and integrated supply chain) differentiates BPM from traditional, functional-management
disciplines. In addition, intrinsic to BPM is the principle of continuous improvement,
perpetually increasing value generation and sustaining the market competitiveness
(or dominance) of the organization.
The characteristics of BPM are complementary to an organization's SOA strategy
with both viewing the use of technology as a business driver. BPM enabled by
SOA is a discipline enhanced by a flexible IT architecture to accelerate the
creation and reuse of business services in support of efficient process change
and rapid process deployment. Bringing together the most advanced SOA-based
software capabilities, along with broad expertise, helps provide a higher value
BPM solution.
Specifically, organizations can benefit from BPM through:
Process Insight and Optimization: the first step in many BPM engagements is
to simply monitor what is happening. Having the ability to truly understand
what is happening inside the business will then cement and facilitate the ability
to enhance the most important and impactful parts of an organization.
Accelerated Process Improvement: this benefit is not just about improvement
and optimization. It's about how fast you can identify the parts of the business
that will drive change and how fast you can implement and deploy those changes
to make the improvement happen.
Flexible Design for Future Change: Finally, it's critical to not only make
infrastructure changes once, but to be prepared for the inevitable future changes
that every organization faces. Using an SOA complemented by best practices helps
ensure that the deployed and optimized processes can be adapted as flexibly
as possible to changing business needs.
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