The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons,
VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results
on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA
customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and
geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM
Lifecycle Assessment. The results show a number of interesting trends
indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their
processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their
ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the
next three years. (1) IT embraces BPM enterprisewide, which broadens the
scope for BPM beyond the existing departmental systems, and centralizes
the practices around BPM. In general, this is occurring because of the
ability of BPM to connect applications into improved business processes;
more than half already are or will be connecting BPM and SOA in their
environment. (2) BPM is becoming event-driven, in order to support the
event-driven nature of business today. This will result in much more
agile processes that can respond to both expected and unexpected events.
(3) Increased focus on knowledge-intensive processes, and using
collaborative BPM to enable ad hoc processes both on their own or as an
offshoot from a structured process... (4) Enterprise social computing:
introducing tagging, wiki, social connectedness and the like with more
traditional process management in order to add context and more easily
collaborate. (5) Moving towards dynamic business applications; Yvonne
Genovese spoke in this keynote about the move towards dynamic/composite
applications in order to free organizations from the pre-canned logic
in packaged enterprise applications, but BPM, together with services
exposed in an SOA layer, allows for the fast assembly of applications
that are more suited to current business needs.