Most embody some aspect of BPM that aims to distinguish it from workflow, application integration or process re-engineering.

“Many companies have emerged disillusioned from the workflow and business re-engineering projects of the nineties,” says Paul Mullon, marketing director at MGX subsidiary (at the time of writing) Metrofile.

“In some cases they managed to lift productivity and efficiency, but often they ended up automating bad processes or introducing expensive and underused layers of software into an already overburdened IT department. Despite the failures of the past, too many organisations still make the same fundamental mistake of applying the technology without understanding the problems they hope to solve and the benefits they would like to achieve.”

Lance Moor, regional channel manager for US firm Lexign, lists specific reasons why workflow as a standalone concept is under threat:

• damaged reputation through high expectations and slow implementations,
• sales people overselling systems,
• underestimating budgets for development, implementation, integration and training,
• perceived high costs as a result,
• shortage of implementation skills,
• workflows not designed by senior executives,
• lack of after-sale support,
• continual change in management,
• insufficient evaluations.

Back to business

“The first wave of BPM really began in the 1920s with the introduction of theories revolving around work practises, methods and procedures,” relates Garry Wilford, special projects director at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). “Processes were implicit in work practices and not automated.

Companies that experienced business process re-engineering during the nineties will be familiar with the once-off nature of process management in this wave.

“In the third wave of BPM – as described in a book titled Business Process Management: the Third Wave by CSC`s Howard Smith and co-author Peter Fingar – the business process is freed from its concrete castings in technology and made the central, focused and basic building block of all automation and business systems. Change is the primary design goal because, in the world of business process management, the ability to change is far more prized than the ability to create in the first place.”

Jon Pyke, CTO at Staffware, which recently sponsored a conference on the subject, put up a slide explaining what problems BPM is trying to solve. “The usual,” he says, pointing to a slide littered with words like “higher margins”, “time to market”, “competitive advantage”, “greater efficiency” and “improved customer service”.

“Every vendor puts up a slide like this. It`s nothing new – all we`re trying to do is solve these problems slightly differently,” he explains.

He believes IT consultants and CIOs have failed to deliver, to date, on the basic requirement of the CEO, which is efficient, flexible and effective technology implementations of business processes, across the organisation.

Through understanding business processes, however, Pyke believes this can change. BPM is nothing more than “a natural convergence of workflow, enterprise application integration and business-to-business integration technologies, providing an architecture that enables faster responses to changes in business strategy.”

In case you wondered when the topic was going to come up, he adds: “BPM may arguably produce the fastest and greatest return on investment than any other technology category today.”

Keen to present BPM as a solution to the problems workflow encountered, Pyke notes that while Gartner estimates 75 percent of e-business projects fail, it also concludes that 90 percent of workflow projects succeed.

Beyond departments

But he draws a clear distinction to explain why BPM is different.

He says implementation failures around workflow or BPM generally occur due to processes being contained within departments, as opposed to integrated into lines of business across the enterprise.

“True BPM is not just about workflow, but its amalgamation with transactional support, distributed processing, enterprise application integration (EAI) and business activity monitoring.”

The usual conceptual change is from workflow to BPM. But Pyke explains that it is equally a change from EAI to BPM: not thinking about monolithic applications, but about process integration.

The conference attendees approved. One even dared call it a “paradigm shift”.

“BPM not only defines and automates business processes, but provides a full 360-degree view of line of business procedures, controls the execution of the organisation and facilitates who does what when,” explains Pyke.

Besides the fact that departments tended to focus inwards when it came to workflow design and business process re-engineering, Mark Mallabone, an executive with IBM South Africa`s software group, says that many implemented ad hoc point solutions.

They are discovering, however, that responsiveness is an issue not only in critical areas such as manufacturing operations, supply chain and customer service.

Wilford says BPM and workflow are in different leagues. “BPM is the executive jetliner compared to workflow`s single-propeller aircraft. They cater for different aspects of the market.”

Chris Cleator, national sales director of CKB, a seller of content management and BPM software, says although South Africa is still an emerging market for BPM, the demand for it is growing.

“The increased demand for BPM is being driven by the consultants,” he says, noting that Gartner and others have, of late, been lauding the benefits of BPM.

Kem Tissiman, MD of consultancy Rethink, says that implementing workflow ten years ago was near impossible. “Now it`s almost routine,” he says.

Cleator says the need to be nimble and cope rapidly with changing regulatory, business and legal requirements has driven demand.

“A number of successful projects have been implemented, and therefore positive reference sites are now available. More budget has been allocated to this sector of business,” he says.

Ready for change

He explains that BPM offers a new and affordable approach to true business efficiency, competitiveness and mission advancement. “By automating and streamlining the unique and routine processes that power your business, BPM offsets the administrative burden of the organisation and creates an environment where processes can be leveraged for strategic value. You get to increase output at the same time you manage your resources for optimum efficiency,” he explains.

Despite the buzzwords, he`s right.

“Change is a constant in business today,” says CSC`s Wilford. “Operating in an increasingly complex and competitive global marketplace requires South African companies to create software and systems that are adaptable. Companies can no longer afford smokestack thinking. They need to design processes that can be changed on the fly and have the ability to cut across the different systems and company boundaries to create an integrated experience.”

It`s a tough sell

Companies such as financial organisations have made major investments in core business systems. Jim Hughes, director of listed IT solution provider Global Technologies, says: “These systems work smoothly and predictably, and no one wants to change them. As a consequence, these organisations are missing a major opportunity to align themselves with current thinking and technology-enabled best practices.”

He warns that the downstream consequences of process misalignment can cascade through the business, leading to unprofitable or wasteful operations and unhappy customers.

George Smalberger, director of Ovations Technologies, names financial services and telecommunications as the most likely sectors to benefit from business process management.

Wilford says that though most large companies have investigated workflow – some having successfully implemented solutions – the big shift from workflow to BPM has not yet happened. “This will change as companies realise the benefits of the increased flexibility that the available products can supply,” he predicts.

He agrees with Smalberger`s assessment of BPM`s potential in financial services companies. “The key issue in BPM is implementing processes that cut across organisational boundaries. Financial services and other industries which have developed applications to address specific departmental issues are prime candidates to benefit from implementing BPM.”

A potential benefit to such companies, however, is that its processes are often well-developed. Steven Lauter, business development manager at the IQ Business Group, says mature processes are needed before they are automated using BPM to gain process efficiency.

Tissiman elaborates on this potential pitfall, noting that two factors impact on overall process performance: its efficiency, which is a design element, and the day-to-day production management effort that is dedicated to it. Focusing only on one of these – as many technology-based efficiency solutions have done – will reduce the potential benefits one can achieve.

Lauter says process maturity begins with the analysis and measurement of processes before technology is applied.

“Diving head first into an exercise is not going to provide results if there is no benchmark to measure it against or the technology is not used correctly. Time needs to be taken to assess the current processes to see whether they need to be redesigned or if the faults lie with the adherence to the process.

“Change management processes then need to be applied to ensure correct and complete acceptance by the intended user base,” he says.

The holy grail – a fully integrated BPM architecture that manages all people, processes and systems in an organisation – creates all sorts of new possibilities.

Alan Burger, director of Tilos Business Solutions, for example, believes BPM can employ artificial intelligence and other techniques to monitor processes and workflows, and to dynamically recommend changes and optimisation.

IBM`s Mallabone offers that it allows companies to leverage existing technology to increase the responsiveness of the organisation in an increasingly competitive market.

Grant Skinner, CEO of solution house Resolution Compusoft, which is a Microsoft Great Plains partner, believes the workflow process can become the impetus for an appropriate business process management strategy. “The convergence of the business drivers and the technology enablers is now not only possible but also achievable at the right price,” he says.

The inhibitors

While the sheer number of BPM vendors may be a sign that IT companies genuinely believe there`s something in it, it`s led to a great deal of complexity too.

Pyke is the first to admit that the proliferation of standards hasn`t done anyone any favours.

“I`m not going to say all standards are bad, but...” he starts an impromptu presentation that he`s testing on the South African audience before taking it to a conference in Munich.

“Think about being railroaded into standards by huge companies with huge marketing budgets, vested interests and dogma,” he warns, exhorting the attendees: “You should get involved with standards development, otherwise you get the standards you deserve, rather than what you need. At the moment, it`s complex, and it`s a mess. The question is, do you need it, and do you need it at this level of complexity?”

In a moment of honesty that`s rare among vendors, he adds: “It doesn`t matter to me as a vendor. It`s going to hurt you. It`s important that business users dictate standards.”

Mallabone notes a caveat about what might be termed user compatibility. “A solution can`t just be appropriate from an IT perspective. It must also be appropriate for the people who need to use it,” he says. “That`s trickier than it might seem, because user needs change constantly and fairly rapidly. A good interface for today`s processes may be useless in a year`s time, when on demand activities have altered the processes substantially.”

Analysing and validating processes is where Lexign`s Moor adds a rider: “The biggest challenge is for companies themselves to understand their own internal processes fully, have them accurately documented and understand the complexities of integration with their back-end systems.”

Wilford warns, however, that companies will have to thoroughly evaluate BPM products and choose the one that best integrates all the relevant applications of their business. “Product vendors will, understandably, lead the way here and will want their product to be the starting point of any investigation. But companies would do well to adopt a product neutral approach initially – conducting a thorough investigation of their requirements before selecting a product,” he counsels.

Web services, ahoy!

According to several BPM experts, web services is a natural progression for BPM. When business processes can be modularised and managed flexibly, there is no reason why they should reside in a monolithic corporate IT structure.

“Web services are the perfect solution,” says Pyke. “It enables collaboration at process level, and will solve the hard bits of enterprise application integration.”

Dimension Data solutions manager Sean Riley looks at it from the opposite direction, positing BPM as the orchestrator that web services needs.

He describes web services orchestration as “EAI for the masses”, serving as a platform layer in network computing that enables composition and co-ordination of services – the building blocks – into long-running transactions and collaborative business processes. The goal is cheaper, better and faster integration availability to the mainstream, while current solutions remain locked into a high-end niche.

Mark Ehmke, MD of Staffware SA, believes these predictions are accurate. He notes that with current business process control solutions, where companies automate many processes, 80 percent of the time is spent on data and application integration.

This leads to a situation in which BPM becomes a strategic requirement to automate and manage end-to-end processes.

He is careful to point out that web services are still in the hype stage. “People are playing with it internally, identifying existing services in their infrastructures and wrapping them in web services. The view is that because web services are open standards, they`re a silver bullet to solve the integration challenge. I don`t think that will happen any time soon – there will be a lot of EAI still.”

But once not only users internally, but vendors too, have turned their applications into web services, the benefits become clear to Ehmke. “Interchangeability of web services means that individual services in, for example, an SAP offering, can be swapped for services from a niche vendor. Your process can dynamically discover and invoke services for a specific purpose, and the process engine will do the orchestration. This is radical stuff,” he says.

This vision of the future of BPM ties in perfectly with the concept of grid computing, IBM`s computing on demand, and a revival of ASP-style software usage.

But he accepts that only forward-thinking vendors will claim the high ground by offering best-of-breed services in niche areas. “Vendors of monolithic packages will,” he claims, “be dragged kicking and screaming into this model by the market.”

With additional reporting by Stephen Whitford of ITWeb.