written by Howard Smith

hat has surprised everyone in the last few years is how chal- Howard Smith is co-chair of the
Business Process Management
lenging it has been to actually do e-business. One of the rea- Initiative (BPMI.org) and CTO
for Computer Sciences Corpor-
sons why this is so is that companies have found it difficult to ation in Europe. Howard is co-
author with Peter Fingar of the forthcoming book:
manage their business processes, especially when they stretch Business Process Management: The Third Wave (mk
press.com)
across multiple systems, software applications, companies, and [email protected].

countries. That’s about to change.

It must change, because shareholders later. These packages implemented best- and best practices to existing middleware
still expect companies to fulfill the promise practice processes, but did so by ingraining approaches helps, but it would be prefer-
of e-business. As Doug Neal of CSC’s business processes in the software applica- able if something similar were embodied in
Research Services reports, “Companies are tions that supported them. These solutions the platforms that support applications.
under pressure to perform better, faster; to had all the flexibility of wet concrete before In the networked enterprise, collabora-
do more with less; and to be super pleasing they were installed and all the flexibility of tion is not restricted to any one process
to customers. This means changing the way dry concrete after installation. domain. Collaboration is now 360 degrees,
they manage their business processes, Achieving process collaboration inside going on at all points on the compass. This
allowing them to innovate around their own the enterprise has been difficult enough. creates a many-to-many integration task,
strategic processes while simultaneously Getting processes to collaborate across the and existing tools and techniques simply are
collaborating with partners and customers.” networked enterprise is much harder. B2B not up to the job. IS departments often try to
participants may have informal designs for develop business processes by performing
Why So Difficult? the processes they need to implement, but bottom-up technical integration, stitching
Many companies tried to make their as they refine those designs they also have together systems components that were
business processes more manageable 10 to change the technical implementations never intended to work together at the busi-
years ago, by reengineering them. At the that support them. This may be possible in ness level. They soon find that these proj-
time, reengineering typically meant design- simple cases, but in more complex cases, ects denude their budgets, and return on
ing a new process, then implementing it such as advanced supply chain design, the investment and delivery time scales are
through a one-time systems and organiza- project may never be completed. According often unacceptable to the project sponsors.
tional change program. These efforts were to Intalio, a vendor of standards-based Not only that, but the ability to change
more about redesigning processes than Business Process Management Systems processes thereafter, to develop custom
about making those processes easy to (BPMS), “upgrading applications or adding variants or to optimize processes on partic-
change and combine with those of partners. new suppliers or business units can cause ular business channels is either hard or
Similar problems existed with ERP and the technical integration activities to esca- impossible.
other packaged solutions that emerged late out of control.” Adding process tools Not all integration problems are techni-

12 June 2002 www.wsj2.com

 odology for data management was built on
What The Analysts Are Saying a formal model called the relational data
model. Today, this is commonplace. By
In the world of alliances and ‘virtual allowing a company to manage its data
companies,’ where many or even most apart from the applications that use it, the
of a firm’s staff may be working on joint database management system (DBMS)
supports a variety of data models and data
projects with other businesses, what
management tasks and tools. The IT indus-
makes an appealing partner? There is a
try as we perceive it today is largely found-
quick and easy checklist concerned with ed on the DBMS. Today’s enterprise appli-
products, prices, market access, finan- cations are primarily concerned with read-
cial muscle and track record. But an cal. Collaboration requires sharing repre- ing, writing, and manipulating data tables
increasingly dominant question is, what sentations for processes that once were – in other words, clerical tasks. This has a
is it actually like to work with these peo- proprietary, and this is not an easy step to profound implication – such applications
ple? How do they do business? Is their take. But if companies are under pressure are stovepipes. Business logic, data model,
to be better, faster, and cheaper, they will time, and connectivity all exist within the
way of doing business likely to prove
have to do only what they do best. individual application. Creating and man-
comfortable and compatible for us? A aging end-to-end processes has, up to
Whatever a company doesn’t do well has to
company's processes are becoming a now, depended upon complex middleware
be done by someone else. Hence, the
key criterion in the beauty parade for growth in process outsourcing and the solutions. Not only is this expensive, it’s
global partners. Is it possible to doubt sourcing of external services. If commerce overly complex.
that the quest for a universal process is to be truly collaborative, the underlying New process management systems of-
descriptor language will be successful? It business processes must collaborate too, fer a potentially simpler, more cost effec-
is increasingly hard to doubt that the both within and across firms. This must be tive, and manageable alternative. One
achieved at the business level and from the immediate benefit will be the ability to
quest will take place, and will command
top down, leveraging existing systems in align processes more directly with organi-
substantial interest and resource during zational objectives. Business processes lit-
the enterprise. That is, collaboration must
the next decade. CSC Research Services erally define the firm and represent the
start from the business purpose, not the
It's no surprise then that BPM is technical constraints. source of all competitive advantages and
quickly emerging as the moniker for the What’s Needed market differentiation. Business processes
next killer app in enterprise software. are complex, long lived, unique, numer-
What business needs is not a one-time
Few areas of software will receive more ous, and constantly evolving. As the drive
fix for individual processes but a connect-
attention in the coming months and towards automation, process outsourcing,
ed systems environment that can flex and
and collaboration continues apace,
years than BPM. Yet the greatest chal- recombine as required by changes in the
processes have the potential to overwhelm
lenges to the BPM market are the very market. Most companies now want more
the firm. Process management systems are
forces making it so attractive. Delphi control over their own processes, more
tools for managing that complexity.
Group interaction between their processes and
In this climate, standard processes
those of their partners, and some control
Enterprises should begin to take delivered in the form of standard applica-
over and monitoring of processes per-
advantage of explicitly defined process- tions that are also available to competitors
formed on their behalf by partners. Firms
es. By 2005, at least 90 percent of large are less and less attractive. Businesses
are also seeking to expose discrete busi-
enterprises will have BPM in their enter- want to shape their processes themselves,
ness competencies as processes they can
perform continuous and incremental
prise nervous system (0.9 probability). sell to others or through channel partners.
process improvement without impedi-
Enterprises that continue to hard-code To do all this, firms need to understand the
ment from technology, and simultaneous-
all flow control, or insist on manual processes that underpin their core busi-
ly exploit low-cost best-of-breed applica-
process steps and do not incorporate ness competencies. In short, they need a
tion components. Powerful new process
BPMS capability, not a new suite of enter-
BPM's benefits, will lose out to competi- servers will support this approach, provid-
prise applications.
tors that adopt BPM. Gartner ing a hybrid environment combining the
The situation is similar to the period
For the Fortune 2000 companies, the best of component application engineer-
before the invention of the relational data-
quest to implement the best business ing and the best of process engineering.
base management system. Business data
The era of stovepipe applications will
process management (BPM) solution is used to be embedded in applications. As
eventually give way to the era of process
becoming highly desirable - akin to the volume of data grew and the connec-
manufacturing.
acquiring the "holy grail" in any given tions between data sets in different appli-
cations became important to the business, A Process Langhuage
industry. BPM promises to streamline The first step is to make processes
it became obvious that data should be
internal and external business process- explicit by abstracting them from applica-
managed outside of the application archi-
es, eliminate redundancies, and increase tecture. For example, managers wanted to tion software. This is hardly new. Decades
automation. IDC Research analyze the data for business performance ago, operating systems were created by
indicators. To achieve this, the new meth- abstracting memory management, file
access, and graphical user interface from

14 June 2002 www.wsj2.com

 applications. Database management unless a solution emerges that is both
systems removed both the manage- as compelling as the RDBMS and SQL
ment of data and the management of and as well-founded as the relational
the schema. Today, business rules are data model.
held and managed in a separate envi- Plugging all the pieces together is
ronment. Process management is the taxing even the most able enterprise
next logical step. IT architects. The hope is that process
One of the key enabling technolo- management will soon be a capability
gies is Business Process Modeling (the BPMS) leveraged by applications,
Language (BPML) published by the not a layer in an already complex
Business Process application stack (see Figure 2). It has
Management Initiative (BPMI.org). to be, since the drivers for BPMS are
The new language – which, like SQL, not only technological but economic.
has a strong mathematical foundation The most complex, dynamic process-
– is a methodological way to represent es tend to be those of higher business
and interact with business process value and strategic importance. Such
(see Figure 1). In effect, the process processes are difficult to co-ordinate
management system abstracts pro- across multiple partners, are unique
cesses out of the application code and to the firm, embody sources of com-
FIGURE 1 Process management terminology by doing so provides a powerful new petitive differentiation and rely upon
capability to business: the ability to continual process improvement and
discover, design, deploy, execute, improved decision making. BPMS
operate, optimize, and analyze pro- offers the chance of providing a tech-
cesses independently of the applica- nological solution to an age-old prob-
tions built on them. The applications lem – BPR and organizational change.
get an end-to-end view of the busi-
ness, looking down from above. They
see the whole process, not just the
changes in data as the process exe-
cutes.
The processes such systems will
support will be reliable, transactional,
concurrent, and distributed. They will
allow collaboration between process-
es designed independently by differ-
ent organizations. Like other stan-
dards, the value of BPML will be per-
ceived only by demonstrating the
power of a process management sys-
tem to the business.

The Shift From the BPM

Layer to BPMS As a
Capability
Many Fortune 2000 companies are
deploying BPM point solutions or
individual layers in the BPM stack.
They find it necessary to deploy EAI
(enterprise application integration),
some use workflow extensively, a few
are piloting departmental process
FIGURE 2 From BPM layer to BPMS capability managers, all use process engineering
tools (BPR) and many have employed
rules- or process-based development
to speed application delivery. It’s a
complex picture. How this mosaic will
migrate towards a standard process-
management environment will be a
fascinating journey. It won’t happen
overnight and it won’t happen at all

16 June 2002 www.wsj2.com