What the analysts are saying about BPM?
In 20 years, when people read these quotes, what will they think?
Did the analysts get it right?
BPM’s potential for business improvement through advanced process automation is the most compelling business reason to implement an “enterprise nervous system” (ENS). Where ENS implementations risk been seen as infrastructure in search of a problem, BPM allows enterprises to raise the level of discussion and make specific business process support the primary reason for the application integration efforts.
Gartner
Enterprises should begin to take advantage of explicitly defined processes. By 2005, at least 90 percent of large enterprises will have BPM in their enterprise nervous system (0.9 probability). Enterprises that continue to hard-code all flow control, or insist on manual process steps and do not incorporate BPM’s benefits, will loose out to competitors that adopt BPM.
Gartner
Business Process Management is THE thing…not integration, not messaging. It goes far beyond integration and hooking up applications. It is the essence of good business.
Gartner
Firms will need process integration servers that model and carry out broad business processes. … The adoption of packaged apps and the development of integration standards like Web Services, has primed the market for a new breed of BPM suites. Firms should start BPM projects today to design, execute, and optimise cross-function business processes.
Forrester Research
The BPM category may arguably provide the greatest return on investment compared to any other category available on the market today. BPM gives organisations the ability to cut operational costs at a time when the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult to boost revenues. … Business Process Management enables government agencies to dismantle obsolete bureaucratic divisions by cutting the labor and paper-intensive inefficiency from manual, backend processes. Faster and auditable processes allow employees to do more in less time, reducing paper use as well as administrative overhead and resources.
Aberdeen Group
The BPMI concepts are right on target … Savvy companies will embrace having a process-centric organisation and will adopt Business Process Management software.
AMR Research
Business processes have been around since the beginning of business. Business Process Management Systems are the next step in making them explicit, executable and adaptable.
Computer Sciences Corporation’s Research Services
It’s no surprise then that BPM is quickly emerging as the moniker for the next Killer App in enterprise software. Few areas of software will receive more attention in the coming months and years than BPM. Yet the greatest challenges to the BPM market are the very forces making it so attractive.
Delphi Group
For the Fortune 2000 companies the quest to implement the best business process management solution is becoming highly desirable — akin to acquiring the “holy grail” in any given industry. BPM promises to streamline internal and external business processes, eliminate redundancies, and increase automation.
IDC
Business Process Management (BPM) is the identification, comprehension and management of business processes that interact with people and systems both within and across organizations. BPM is quickly becoming one of the hottest topics in the IT industry. Many believe the powerful integration story behind the BPM concept has the potential to unlock the e-business market. … In the current economic climate, business process flexibility is key to organizational survival. But the logic of business process tends to get hard-wired into highly expensive IT systems that are complex and stifle innovation. … Demand from users for flexibility and functionality is driving the need for systems that can deliver across enterprise processes that are not reliant on a single application, or indeed are not constrained by the boundaries of the organization itself.
Ovum
Businesses need to constantly adapt their processes, yet they are often held back by static IT systems that aren’t designed to exploit future opportunities. Business process management is a new change management and systems implementation methodology that overcomes this problem.
Ovum
Disclaimer: I used Avoka’s publication as the quote source. I did not verify authenticity of the quotes with the analysts.
Adam Deane 
Interesting – they didn’t mention anything about knowledge workers, or ad-hoc unpredictable human processes.
So I think that in 20 years people will be saying “Interesting that they put so much focus on all those routine, structured processes that we outsourced years ago. Instead they should have focused on knowledge worker productivity – managing all those unstructured and dynamic activities where players make decisions and redefine processes based on the situations at-hand, experience, and available information”
By: Jacob Ukelson on 06/05/2010
at 1:44 pm
Great overview. I think that in 20 years, we will all be a bit wiser and realize that business processes are not things that are easily deconstructed and reconstructed like Legos. As Jacob mentioned in his comments, no one touched on the human elements of BPM – in 20 years, we’re going to laugh at the thought that business processes could be created and optimized without a major reliance on the human factor. We’ll unfortunately always have “blowhard-ism”, as indicated in some of these analyts’ comments, but maybe we’ll ultimately get closer to the truth (or at least reality) one day.
By: Pat Flanders on 14/05/2010
at 4:33 am
Hi Pat,
Thanks for the response. Much appreciated.
Jacob’s comment had pushed me to start looking into unstructured and dynamic activities.
I’m not sure yet where I stand on this issue and will need to do more research.
I totally agree with your comment that business processes cannot be created and optimized without a major reliance on the human factor and I don’t understand why this is not pushed more by the industry analysts and BPM experts. The human elements are the make or break in a BPM solution.
Cheers,
Adam
By: Adam Deane on 14/05/2010
at 4:12 pm