Business Process Management

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Business process management (BPM) is a topic that is gaining considerable momentum on the IT agenda alongside the explosion of Web services. This is no accident. It has been fueled by a combination of technical and economic factors, along with the usual dose of marketing hype. The sheer proliferation of three- and four-letter acronyms, the politics of standardization, and the number of different camps involved in the business process space make a clear understanding of BPM quite a challenge. In this month's CDS, I take the covers off the BPM marketing machine, look at the history behind BPM and explain why it is so relevant today. I'll do this by distilling the key BPM concepts from both IT and business viewpoints. We'll see that BPM, together with Web services, is starting to make possible the vision of plug-and-play business that is embodied in the best component-based approaches. I'll also track some of the relevant developments in technology and standards, including business process languages. My main focus, however, is pinpointing the challenges of BPM and considering how best to move forward in what is a moving playing field.