The Next Wave

Embracing new game-changing technologies that don't "fix IT", but instead take the software development process off the critical path of business change and innovation, these companies are intent on dominating the decade ahead and achieving never before possible gains in productivity and agility. What GE and other companies are pursuing is a breakthrough that makes end-to-end, dynamic, expanding, contracting and ever changing business processes manageable. What's needed to accomplish this is the third wave of business process management (BPM): In the first wave of business process management, which began in the 1920s and was dominated by Fredrick Taylor's theory of management, processes were implicit in work practices and not automated. In the second wave of the past decade or so, processes were manually re-engineered and, through a one-time activity, cast in concrete in the bowels of today's automated ERP and other packaged, off-the-shelf systems. In the third wave of BPM, the business process is freed from its concrete castings and made the central focus and basic building block of all automation and business systems. They become first-class citizens in the world of automation. Change is the primary design goal because in the world of business process management, the ability to change is far more prized than the ability to create in the first place. It is through agile business process management that entire value chains can be monitored, continuously improved and optimised. Feedback of results, agility and adaptability are the bywords of the third wave. The question is, however, how can such noble goals be attained?

In the minds of many companies, business processes have become synonymous with integration, but that conception is far from accurate or complete. While systems integration in fact creates "integrated processes", it does not necessarily open those processes to further processing.

It does not recognise that processes have a life cycle all of their own, independent of the IT systems that drive their automation. In addition, integration processes are only one form a business process may take. Many business processes, such as the movement of goods, the behaviour of machines and manual work, are quite independent of any automation support from IT systems. IT may still, however, play a huge role in understanding and improving these "non-IT" processes, through the digital execution and simulation of process models. Conventional thinking about the relationship between IT and business processes must change if companies are to gain the process agility they need to compete in today's uncertain world and super-competitive marketplace.

If end-to-end business processes are the focus of internal and cross-company integration, why not deal directly with the "business process, as application" instead of "data" and "applications"? Because business processes can no longer be cast in concrete the way they are in today's applications, the "business process" must supersede the "application" as a means of packaging software. In addition, companies must leverage existing IT investments as they build new process-aware information systems that understand the enterprise process design right across the value chain. Companies are demanding a breakthrough that shifts the locus of automation from the affairs of IT to the affairs of the business.

They want to shift their efforts from further automating integration to make up for the limitations of IT, and move on to managing business processes. That breakthrough is the methodology of BPM and its technology engine - the business process management system (BPMS).