How do you know when you need a BPM solution?

Question

My customer is looking for a Business Process Management (BPM) solution. What they need is simple document routing and an approval system. What are the drivers for implement

Answer 1

Ultimately, all business systems that deal with processing of business related information are BPM or workflow systems. Any business's information processing can be described in terms of workflows or "business processes", involving roles and activities.

The fact that these business activities are often described in Java, C# or other programming languages is basically just the result of automation without mature enough technology for prescription and description of business processes with automatic agents.

The emphasis has been on growth, time to market, and so on, and computerisation was carried out without proper thought about long term maintenance and flexibility. 99% of what is in code now should not be.

In contrast, real time control systems, video games, high performance computing, forecasting, business intelligence and mathematical analysis are all examples of problems that do not lend themselves to graphical workflow description. These are things that should be done by computers and maintained by computer experts.

Business processes should be prescribed, described, and readable by business operations experts. The flexibility gains will become increasingly recognised as the technology that enables this (workflow systems) gets better, and more widely accepted as the world economy de-emphasises "growth".