BPM Goes Mainstream

April 3, 2008 from Baseline – “The good news is that technology to support business process management (BPM) has become widely accepted, with a majority of enterprises having BPM projects, according to a pair of recent surveys.

The bad news is that implementing BPM—which requires real process change to succeed—is no slam dunk. In fact, in a recent survey from Forrester Research a majority of IT professionals at 142 companies reported the type of mixed results from BPM more closely associated with a three-pointer.”

180 View – Another misunderstood acronym is BPM. BPM is software to improve business process. Just like all new technology, there is the usual hype and implementation based on the potential merits of technology. It’s not surprising that there are lots of problems if the technology is purchased for the wrong reasons. It could also be difficult if the tool is not integrated with the existing systems. The article says “The most unexpected finding… was the frequent use of BPM technology as a tool to support new product development and innovation”. Our view is that BPM does make sense when creating new processes from scratch. You have a clean slate and don’t need to worry about integrating existing systems, data or processes.