Vendors are keen to make a science of the obvious; it propels their sales TERMINOLOGICAL EXACTITUDE, as Winston Churchill learned in South Africa a century ago, is important. So it may be prudent to define the topic at hand.

First, the obvious: All business is process driven and has been since time immemorial. Gareth Holton, a business analyst at nVisionIT, notes that an activity as simple as issuing a cheque to pay for goods amounts to a business process.

Rethink Management Consulting managing director Kem Tissiman argues that a reading of current literature shows at least four different approaches are currently being lumped under the "BPM" rubric.

"The first of the popular uses of `BPM` is where it stands for Business Process Management and is seen as a holistic management approach encompassing a set of business practices and management disciplines that ensure that business processes are constantly monitored and changed over time to ensure that they are both optimal and aligned with corporate strategy," he says. "This is the BPM approach recently espoused by Gartner."

Tissiman says the second popular use of "BPM" is where it also stands for Business Process Management, but has been adopted by workflow vendors to describe their next-generation software. They also tend to promote the implementation of BPM systems with SOA (services oriented architecture) to build flexible automated processes.

"The key difference between this and the first approach is that this community sees a BPM strategy as being about the implementation of a BPM system, as opposed to BPM being a company-wide management strategy that may include BPM systems as one of many enablers they may use."

A third use for the acronym `BPM` is where process mapping and documentation tools are also referred to as Business Process Management tools or systems.

"This is based on the notion that in order to manage an organisation`s processes over time, they first need to be accurately documented in their current form. With this as a starting point, processes can then be properly analysed and improved going forward," Tissiman says.

The fourth major use of the acronym BPM is by the BI community, where it is used as the abbreviation for Business Performance Management (also termed CPM or Corporate Performance Management), and seen as the next generation of BI. "In this case, BPM relates to the use of financial and non-financial metrics or key performance indicators to present the current state of a business."

Which approach does he subscribe to? None. "An organisation would do well to take into account all four approaches. The first approach entrenches management practices that ensure that processes are assessed and improved on an ongoing basis. Number Three adds process documentation to provide a foundation for the future. Then undertake process automation [approach two] as and where it will unlock further benefits, and lastly, implement a sound BI/BPM tool to provide information on how processes are performing," he advises.