Social Networking and BPM of the Future
We find more and more social networking type capabilities creeping into BPM offerings of different vendors. This includes the integration of instant messaging, Wikis, discussion forums, and collaboration. However, these are all patchwork; at their core most BPM offerings are highly structured in nature. These ad hoc collaborative capabilities are added on top of a structured solution to leverage some of the benefits. At the core, they remain rigid solutions that are difficult to change.
I believe that in the near future we will see a new generation of BPM solutions that are built on top of social networking platforms such as Google Wave.
These solutions will have some unique characteristics:
• Rich, real-time communication and collaboration among participants will be a given, instead of something that is added on as an afterthought.
• The solutions will be dynamic in nature in the sense that the process will define itself as it is being used. It will adjust and adapt to changing needs. Since the process will define itself, it will be continuously tested in real-life situations.
• The solutions will use integrated BI capabilities to express the flow or map of the process and extract key performance indicators. The structure and the key performance indicators can be used to model and optimize the process, thus providing the ingredients necessary for BPM.
• Since Google Wave and other similar products are cloud-based, these BPM solutions will be cloud-based.

FAQ: BPM defined
What is BPM?
What problems does BPM aim to solve?
How are BPM and BPMS different?
How do BPM and SOA work together?
How have BPM tools changed?
How much does BPM cost?
How long does BPM take?

Approaches to BPM
Business Process Management (BPM) means different things to different people, depending on the processes that need to be managed and how. We've categorized four major types of BPM below.
• Workflow-oriented BPM
• Document-oriented BPM
• Business Rule-Oriented BPM
• EAI-oriented BPM

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Forrester for 2010 : Business Process Professionals Trends
Business process professionals' jobs and responsibilities are in transition -- largely moving from IT into the business, with a heavy focus on increasing the overall process skills up and down the organization.
Process Professionals Cut Across Business And IT .
Our interviews uncovered specific responsibilities within the business process professional ranks. Altogether, we uncovered six sub-roles for business process professionals and gave them descriptive titles: 1) the business “stakeholder;” 2) the “change agent;” 3) the “guru;” 4) the “prodigy;” 5) the “wannabe;” and 6) the “operator.”
We will focus on three broad efforts to help business process professionals:
• Implement packaged solutions to support cross-functional and departmental business processes. • Deploy business process management (BPM) suites to support cross-functional processes.
• Integrate data -- whether it is from a data warehousing solution, a BI product or predictive analytics into business processes.

Winning Strategy for BPM
I recommend [as do many others] selecting your first process to manage using the following criteria:
• A process with some visibility
• A process that management would like to see improved
• A process that when improved would bring a financial gain to the company
• A process that can be measured
Select a process where success is attainable in a short period of time. Demonstrate success on improving/managing this process and you will be well positioned to take on the next process. Build on your successes.

The BPM Trends I See
What I see in the future of BPM are the Three Ss: Socialization, SaaS and Simplification. All three are related consequences of the same force that is the Internet.

Looking Ahead at Business Process Management, 2009
The improvements are based on more use of complex event processing (CEP) technology, various types of integration especially in support of supply chain automation, and a stronger tie to business intelligence (BI) software.
There is an overriding historical fact you should consider as you adopt or increase your use of BPM software in 2009. It is important to realize that the BPM decisions you make now are decisions your enterprise will likely live with long after you’ve left or retired. For proof, look at the number of IT departments that are still using 1980s and early 1990s technology and products in transaction processing (TP), ERP, customer relationship management (CRM), and similar solution areas.

BPMS Usage Patterns
• Human-centric (which may be long-running)
• Document-centric
• System-centric
• Decision-centric
• Case management
• Project-centric
• Event-centric

Business process automation vs. BPM
What's the difference between BPM and BPA?
Who is involved with BPM and BPA?
How do the objectives of BPM and BPA differ?

Gartner-Research Index: A Guide to Principles of BPM
This report provides an index of foundational research designed to help business and IT members of business process improvement teams understand the underlying principles of business process management (BPM) success.
Key Findings
• BPM is a more-effective approach to improving business processes that require frequent or continuous process change.
• The rate of process change has accelerated as businesses become more interlinked and regulated within a global economy, and the need for process agility is increasingly important for business success.
• There are six characteristics that distinguish BPM from other approaches to business process improvement and that make it the most appropriate approach for delivering process agility and business value.
Recommendations
• Make business processes visible through explicit process models, and use them to foster collaboration between business and IT across all phases of the process life cycle.
• Adopt an agile, "build to change" approach to your process improvement efforts.
• Familiarize yourself with the research underlying these BPM principles and the two Gartner BPM research frameworks referenced in order to maximize your ability to put Gartner's advice on BPM into action.

Gartner-BPM: Important to Do, Important to Do Right
Key Issues:
• How do you assess organizational readiness?
• What does a plan for getting started look like?
• What are the critical success factors to long-term success with BPM?
Tactical Guidelines:
• For BPM success, you must be skilled at influencing culture.
• Determine what skills are needed and map them to project resources.
• Successful projects have an effective sponsor
• Defining all the steps in the beginning will save time and increase the success rate.
• Write the plan and focus on what the reader wants to know about the project — why, what, when, how and results.
• Pick a project that will be visible, quick and successful.
• Don't fall into the trap of picking the tool first before obtaining a comprehensive understanding of your needs

Ways to Reduce BPM Implementation Cost
Strategies
1. Choosing the right BPM tool
2. Running BPM as a cloud Service
3. Adopting a suitable development methodology

Gartner Predicts 2010
Business Process Management Will Expand Beyond Traditional Boundaries
Key Findings
• By 2014, business process networks (BPNs) will underpin 35% of new multienterprise integration projects.
• By 2014, 40% of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 enterprises will use comprehensive business process models to support their daily work, up from 6% in 2009.
• Through 2014, the act of composition will be a stronger opportunity to deliver value from software than the act of development.
• By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.
• By 2012, 20% of customer-facing processes will be knowledge-adaptable and assembled just in time to meet the demands and preferences of each customer, assisted by BPM technologies. Recommendations
• Look beyond horizontal integration services and seek more comprehensive BPN solutions to automate and manage multienterprise B2B processes.
• Establish process modeling as an organizational competency, and reflect this skill in job descriptions and hiring practices for business managers and knowledge workers.
• Shift your thinking about projects, organizations and collaboration across business and technical roles in light of the movement from applications to compositions.
• Evaluate how dynamic the processes that run your organization are, and design business processes to support changes made in collaboration between business and IT personnel.
• Seek new vendors — or pressure current ones — to augment your BPM technologies with tools to better support knowledge-adaptable, customer-facing processes.

Lessons in efficiency
Tip: Consider BPM over ERP as a possible solution.
Lessons:
• If complex, legacy applications are your problem, find your way to the future through BPM rather than ERP.
• Implementing BPM software had drastically reduced information transfer error rates with the less expensive and easier than with ERP.
It takes less effort to change business rules via BPM than it does to go in on the back end of an ERP system and try to make a change
• BPM focuses on continual improvement
• Stay agile
• Don't let upper management discourage you from process mapping

2009 BPM State of the Market Report
Authored by Nathaniel Palmer, this 70-page market report features an exhaustive body research from the 6-month survey of 500 companies currently using or evaluating business process management. The report presentes 60 unique charts and tables, covering a range of topics including: success factors and current practices in establishing a BPM Center of Excellence, reported Return on Investment (ROI) rate and coefficients, spending plans and priorities, and BPM vendor rankings.
Chapters include:
• BPM Adoption and Usage
• Current Benefits & Issues with BPM
• Role of the CoE/PMO
• Approach to BPMS
• Investment Appraisal and BPMS

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