BPM Key Factor in Modern Program Management

In its basic form, BPM is simply drawing pictures (models) of how the business does its work. But like everything else, what started with pretty pictures for people to meet and decide on has quickly evolved into standards, tools, automated whiz-bangs, etc. And it's easy to get them all mixed up.

Because you're making a picture of how business activities take place, that's kind of like a workflow. Well heck, there are a lot of companies that make workflow engines, and they had to get in on the act. Wouldn't it be neat if you could model the workflow and program the workflow engine at the same time?

Likewise, there are a lot of companies that make modeling software. Of course we needed some new standards for these pictures. BMP extensions to UML, or perhaps our own proprietary formats.

Then there were the application vendors, Microsoft and the like. It seems natural that once we have a picture of how the business works, we could translate that into programs sitting on our corporate servers, right?

These are all great ideas, and it's possible to take a BPM exercise and work forward into all kinds of technology solutions. But the key factors: discussion and agreement on business processes, valuation of enterprise activities, control over software development and budgeting -- we shouldn't miss the fact that this is where the meat is. This is the good stuff.

I think it's neat that we can move so easily from BPM to deployed applications. But the key aspect of BPM is the decision-making process and communication capabilities, not all the gee-whiz bells and whistles.

For a longer discussion on how BPM is changing the workforce -- the view from the trenches, InfoWorld has a in-depth discussion here.