I think it really depends on your tool. The Dutch Grovernment used Intalio|BPMS to model a process that has 250,000 tasks, and hundreds of actors. Through proper fragmentation of the macro process into independent processes, they managed to do it in a maintainable way. As far as interoperability is concerned, there is an answer: it’s called BPMN+BPEL, and it’s up to the vendors to support it.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I agree, but I would not call process audit BPM either.

I agree with you. More abstraction is needed. Let’s work on it together!

I could not agree more. In the meantime, take a look at Intalio.

The mechanism by which these arrive and depart can be regarded as a transport or logistics PROCESS. I regard BPM as the logistics strategy — end to end delivery. The VEHICLES used for transport are the equivalent of BPMS tools. Lorries and vans are a subset of the logistics process and are a means to an end — SOA & EAI are analogues here. Crude analogy, but meant to show that SOA is a subset of BPMS.

Now, to the average person, when you discuss deliveries, what springs to mind? The car/van/lorry, the need for vehicles, or the end-to-end process? Exactly! I suspect that is why there is more of a focus on technology in Google queries. Howard is right in that the real business benefit/interest is higher up the food chain in end-to-end processes.

The challenge for us is to make the process view more attractive to a wider audience — if we don’t we’ll end up with the equivalent of trying to move a house using a Ferrari. It may look sexy, it may grab the attention of a lot of people because it’s fun to drive, but it will never deliver the benefits and savings that a big van would. A company using good processes (the right size vehicle for the job) will win out, but is less likely to be featured in the news.

I tend to see the current generation of BPM tools too biased towards the technical. They do provide an admirable bridge to the business world, but I would hesitate to deploy processes developed only by a Business Developer.

I think that this reflects in the trend as well, BPM sounds like a good idea; most people have become BPM aware. Too often it stops there as people struggle to see how it will work for them in their environments. SOA is a natural fit for BPM, and in some ways the cart has come before the horse. I agree with those comments that have forecast an upward trend may emerge soon as SOA is implemented more widely.

I believe that there is a piece missing that should appear above the BPM layer, one that is more native for the Business Expert. ARIS is in this space, but I don’t think that they are addressing it properly. I would hope to see some standard emerge that covers this area and interface to those around BPM. I’m convinced that will drive BPM even faster.

Cheers

AJAX is trending way up! Unfortunately, I think AJAX is a also a football team somewhere in Spain… BPM also means beats per minute among other things. I guess we need a semantic trend analysis.

What a great post! I could not agree more.

I’m a bit biased on this topic, since I work for the Ecosystems group at SAP where we’ve just opened a sneak preview of a new community for the people who design great processes and work to implement them via (SAP and other) platforms and software, but I see anecdotal and market evidence of the rise of BPM and the importance of differentiation via business process (our own market research, a few interesting recent books, a regular CIO magazine column, discussions with customers at our user conferences, insight into the changing demographics of our online developer community, discussion with two major analyst firms…).

Maybe what we saw, and what Ismael is charting, was a hype cycle that peaked too early, when there still wasn’t enough in the way of tools, platforms, methodologies, etc. to make it real or to produce the over-hyped hoped-for results. So: a problem of timing. But now that the underlying infrastructure (not just I.T., but the “softer” infrastructure, too) is being put in place, I’m betting on a re-emergence and rise in BPM and differentiating business processes in general.

SAP — a huge and influential player — is betting on this, too. The company talks about the coming “business process platform.” And who will make this thing hum? A business process expert… Someone who can translate innovative (or simply efficient) processes into software behaviors, workflows, and the rest thru modeling tools, configuration, etc.

So, we’re building a business process expert (BPX) community now at bpx.sap.com. It doesn’t officially launch until September, but in the meantime we give BPXs an opportunity to help shape the conversation and the community, to suggest content and tools they need, interface with SAP directly, to test, to describe real case studies and experiences, to debate best practices…

We’d be happy to get feedback from Ismael’s IT|Redux readers as (free) members of this new community as we place our bets on the side of the BPeXperts who (I think) will increasingly drive strategic advantage and competitive differentiation via process innovation.

I would love nothing more than being wrong on this one. Problem is, BPM is not just a methodology, it’s both a methodology and a technology that are combined to serve a specific purpose. And good technology can fail if it is not marketed properly. I believe that BPM, as both a methodology and a technology, could fail if it does not capture the imagination of business folks and technical people, hence my original post. We need to fix that.

The reason BPM is not so popular as a trend term has nothing to do with Ismael’s analysis. Ismael is a great guy, but on this, he is simply wrong. BPM is a MANAGEMENT discipline, and as such, won’t get attention from the Tech Press. Indeed, the whole idea of BPM, as a lifecycle improvement process, is only practiced by a small number of leading firms. Fortunately, their market valuation speaks for BPM. Here is an analogy: Great books are written by authors, not Word Processors. Great processes are written by business people, not a BPMS. A BPMS is no more important than a Word processor. It is a tool. It is a business tool. It is not a Tech Tool, like SOA or AJAX. That’s why SOA and AJAX will be hyped by the IT industry. The IT industry uses the IT infrastructure to hype its technologies. Business users don’t enjoy, or need, the same.

I agree with you. We need IBM and Oracle to validate the market, much like they did six or seven years ago with the application server market. With BPMN and BPEL now firmly established as industry standards, it seems to me that BPM is ready for prime time, finally!

BPM adoption by System Integrators & IT Services Companies is very limited. There is lot of confusion over what BPM means, and who should own it within an IT Services firm. I agree with you to the extent that unless and until BPM vendors build a strong partner ecoystem around their products, BPM implementations at large scale will not happen. With big players like Oracle & IBM adopting the BPEL & BPMN standards in their products, we should see more implementations happening in this space in the near future though.

What it must have been like when instant gratification wasn’t so instant… I have been trying to find the exact quote that’s attributed to Bill Gates about how technology always takes longer to catch on than you first expect, …