The Process-Managed Enterprise

While the vision of process management is not new, existing theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business processes –until now. By placing business processes on center stage, corporations can gain the capabilities they need to innovate, reenergize performance and deliver the value today’s markets demand. This book heralds a breakthrough in process thinking that obliterates the business-IT divide, utterly transforms today’s information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution.

A process-managed enterprise makes agile course corrections, embeds six sigma quality and reduces cumulative costs across the value chain. It pursues strategic initiatives with confidence, including mergers, consolidation, alliances, acquisitions, outsourcing and global expansion. Process management is the only way to achieve these objectives with transparency, management control and accountability.

During the reengineering wave of the 1990s, management prophets' books full of stories about other companies were all you had to guide the transformation of your business. Although their underlying theories were based on age-old common sense and general systems theory proposed fifty years earlier, they offered no path to execution. By contrast, the process-managed enterprise grasps control of internal processes and communicates with a universal process language that enables partners to execute on shared vision – to understand each other’s operations in detail, jointly design processes and manage the entire lifecycle of their business improvement initiatives.

Process management is not another form of automation, a new killer-app or a fashionable new management theory. Process management discovers what you do and then manages the lifecycle of improvement and optimization, in a way that translates directly to operation. Whether you wish to adopt industry best practices for efficiency or pursue competitive differentiation, you will need process management. Based on a solid mathematical foundation, the BPM breakthrough is for business people. Designed top down in accordance with a company’s strategy, business processes can now be unhindered by the constraints of existing IT systems.

You will find this brave new world inside the pages of Business Process Management: The Third Wave. Short on stories and long on insight and practical information, this book will help you write your own story of success. The book provides the first and only authoritative analysis of how BPM changes everything in business -- and what it portends. Welcome to the company of the future, the fully digitized corporation, the process-managed enterprise. Welcome to the next fifty years of IT.

ISBN: 0-929652-33-9
Published September 2002 by 

Meghan-Kiffer Press
Advanced Business-Technology Books
for Competitive Advantage

Category: Business
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The Next Fifty Years
There is something wrong with IT, something dreadfully wrong. For the past fifty years computers have been "data machines" recording the after-the-fact results of business activity. Companies are stuck in this data-centric world of IT where there's an ever growing disconnect between the business and the technology it deploys. Because the data-centric paradigm of IT won't take us past where we are today, we must break it!

Companies currently spend over 30% of their IT budgets integrating their data-centric applications under the banner of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), trying to get their internal act together for yet another step, B2B Integration (B2Bi). Industry veteran, Jeanne Baker, explains the situation, "Imagine a world where people speak a language that brilliantly describes the molecular structure of a large object but can’t tell you what the object is – or that it’s about to fall on you.You’ve just glimpsed today’s arcane world of application integration." Why are companies going to all this effort and expense? They are tying together fragments of their stovepipe applications to create end-to-end, multi-company business processes – those activities that bring ultimate value to customers.  

But if end-to-end business processes are the focus of internal and cross-company integration, why not deal directly with the “business process” instead of “applications”? Business processes can no longer be second-class citizens cast in concrete the way they are in today’s applications and systems integration practices.The “business process” must supersede the application as the primary unit for packaging software. In addition, we must enable IT to leverage existing application investments and allow them to build new process aware applications that understand the enterprise process design right across the value chain. But such a lofty objective cannot be reached without a breakthrough that shifts the locus of automation from applications to businessprocesses. That breakthrough is Business Process Management (BPM), its technology engine, the Business Process Management System (BPMS), and its language of process, the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) standard (published by the BPMI.org). 

By shifting the focus from applications to the business process, IT will move closer to the way business really is – constantly changing, messy, unordered and  chaotic. The shift will also reflect another important reality, that every business person, department, company, customer and supplier works in parallel, yet is trying to achieve a common goal – delivering compelling value for customers.

The BPMS is not fantasy, for it, like other true breakthroughs, is based in the mathematics, specifically, Process Calculus, the mathematics of computation that underpins distributed, mobile processes, as opposed to static relational data. Without this foundation, businesses would be correct in thinking that the BPMS is just another buzzword, acronym or marketing ploy –more hype. Here is the truly breakthrough part. The BPMS can execute processes directly and immediately –no software development needed!

It was not the development of the personal computer that led to the personal computing revolution; it was the world’s first spreadsheet, Visicalc. In the early 1970s, personal computers were the toys of hobbyists and the nerds that loved to tinker with programs written in Basic. Corporations went to great lengths to keep these toys out of their offices since if they were to be put to any business use, business people would require great effort from IT to program them for each and every user. Enter Visicalc.Visicalc gave business people direct manipulation of familiar rows and columns of data and the ability to conduct what-if analyses to optimize results. No programming needed –simply design and, presto, execute.Visicalc took IT off the critical path of personal computing and launched a revolution.

Enter the BPMS.The BPMS gives business people direct manipulation of familiar business processes and the ability to conduct what-if analyses to optimize results. No programming needed –simply design, and, presto, execute.The BPMS takes application development off the critical path of business process management –and off the critical path of business change and innovation. Do not conclude that BPM is a lightweight solution suitable only for trivial tasks. BPM encompasses a mission critical infrastructure equal to, or exceeding, that of today’s massively scaleable, fault tolerant, data management and transaction processing systems. Welcome to the Next Fifty Years of IT. --

HOWARD SMITH is Chief Technology Officer (Europe) of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and co-chair of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org). With more than 24 years in the IT industry, he is a sought after speaker and advisor. His work in predicting and shaping technology at the intersection with business led him to take an active role in the development and application of the third wave. He is currently researching the application of business process management to corporate sustainability, innovation and growth, for which he has global research and development responsibility at CSC.

PETER FINGAR is an Executive Partner with the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He delivers keynotes world wide and is author of the best-selling books, The Death of "e" and the Birth of the Real New Economy and Enterprise E-Commerce. Over his 30-year career he has taught graduate and undergraduate computing studies and held management, technical and consulting positions with GTE Data Services, Saudi Aramco, the Technical Resource Connection division of Perot Systems and IBM Global Services, as well as serving as CIO for the University of Tampa.

Howard and Peter can be reached at authors@bpm3.com.

BPMI.org, a non-profit association, develops mission-critical methodologies and standards for business process representation, notation and manipulation. Members represent industry leaders in the fields of business process reengineering, workflow management, process management, application integration, process mapping & discovery, process modeling & analysis, business rules management, business simulation, IT outsourcing, application architecture, business process management, process-based software development, enterprise applications, Web services, process outsourcing and value chain management.

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