r Business in a nut shell is about looking at ways to ensure that : 1) BPM has to be driven by business objectives. BPM cannot work without a strong top level backing. 2) Process is understood well and modified in case required (Process Analysis & Implementation) 3) The process management approach should be implementable in the organization which might be used to a specific way I would like to start by raising a question to all, What do you think is BPM?. To make the discussion specific, lets start by narrowing down the debate for BPM in two dimensions:

1) BPM from Business view 2) BPM for Technology view

Most of us will probably answer and would agree that BPM is both a Business and a technical concept and depends on the context of discussion can be defined separately. For me the definitions can be as follows (very generically)

BPM for Business can be defined as a way of thinking and an approach which allows the organization to focus and manage its business processes with the aim of deriving efficiency and excellence in its way of working across multiple levels of business to achieve defined corporate objectives

So, for all obvious reasons, every organization should be looking at improving their existing business processes, which can be either by a) modifying the way they do a particular manual activity or set of activities for e.g. Instead of all loan applications reaching the underwriter for manual approval, have a screening process to remove obvious rejections. b) Automating part of the process c) etc. etc.

Many organizations based on above definitions will say they do BPM. The main difference of “BPM” in this context also is to ensure that these process management activities are aimed at having a broader level view of the process to allow cross-functional benefits rather than a silo based approach which has been employed over the years. So BPM for Business in a nut shell is about looking at ways to ensure that : 1) BPM has to be driven by business objectives. BPM cannot work without a strong top level backing. 2) Process is understood well and modified in case required (Process Analysis & Implementation) 3) The process management approach should be implementable in the organization which might be used to a specific way o

n can be defined separately. For me the definitions can be as follows (very generically)

BPM for Business can be defined as a way of thinking and an approach which allows the organization to focus and manage its business processes with the aim of deriving efficiency and excellence in its way of working across multiple levels of business to achieve defined corporate objectives

So, for all obvious reasons, every organization should be looking at improving their existing business processes, which can be either by a) modifying the way they do a particular manual activity or set of activities for e.g. Instead of all loan applications reaching the underwriter for manual approval, have a screening process to remove obvious rejections. b) Automating part of the process c) etc. etc.

Many organizations based on above definitions will say they do BPM. The main difference of “BPM” in this context also is to ensure that these process management activities are aimed at having a broader level view of the process to allow cross-functional benefits rather than a silo based approach which has been employed over the years. So BPM for Business in a nut shell is about looking at ways to ensure that : 1) BPM has to be driven by business objectives. BPM cannot work without a strong top level backing. 2) Process is understood well and modified in case required (Process Analysis & Implementation) 3) The process management approach should be implementable in the organization which might be used to a specific way

So, for all obvious reasons, every organization should be looking at improving their existing business processes, which can be either by a) modifying the way they do a particular manual activity or set of activities for e.g. Instead of all loan applications reaching the underwriter for manual approval, have a screening process to remove obvious rejections. b) Automating part of the process c) etc. etc.

Many organizations based on above definitions will say they do BPM. The main difference of “BPM” in this context also is to ensure that these process management activities are aimed at having a broader level view of the process to allow cross-functional benefits rather than a silo based approach which has been employed over the years. So BPM for Business in a nut shell is about looking at ways to ensure that : 1) BPM has to be driven by business objectives. BPM cannot work without a strong top level backing. 2) Process is understood well and modified in case required (Process Analysis & Implementation) 3) The process management approach should be implementable in the organization which might be used to a specific way

t of the process c) etc. etc.

Many organizations based on above definitions will say they do BPM. The main difference of “BPM” in this context also is to ensure that these process management activities are aimed at having a broader level view of the process to allow cross-functional benefits rather than a silo based approach which has been employed over the years. So BPM for Business in a nut shell is about looking at ways to ensure that : 1) BPM has to be driven by business objectives. BPM cannot work without a strong top level backing. 2) Process is understood well and modified in case required (Process Analysis & Implementation) 3) The process management approach should be implementable in the organization which might be used to a specific way

r Business in a nut shell is about looking at ways to ensure that : 1) BPM has to be driven by business objectives. BPM cannot work without a strong top level backing. 2) Process is understood well and modified in case required (Process Analysis & Implementation) 3) The process management approach should be implementable in the organization which might be used to a specific way of working (Organization Change & Governance). You need process owners with cross functional reporting structure/visibility. 4) Success is repeatable across organization - Directly linked to top level support 5) BPM is considered a “Process” way of thinking with business objectives in mind and is aided by technology and not the other way round

BPM from Technology Perspective - Simple Definition : A combination of techniques and technology to allow a process to be defined, analyzed, deployed, automated/executed and monitored in a closed loop allowing continous process improvements.

So any technology which tries to aid in above can be called as a part of BPM implementation framework (This could mean a huge laundry list of technology combinations ) . Keeping the current technology landscape in mind we know that the BPM tools can be either strong in the way they handle human tasks (Human Intensive or workflow based BPM tools) and system tasks (System Intensive or Integration centric BPM tools). Most of the tools vendors are converging their offerings to provide a combination of both (hopefully this will reach a level of maturity soon, which is currently lacking a bit). Being a vast subject and to avoid digressing from my point, we know that there are BPM products in the market which provide the business with capabilities to manage and maintain business processes.

So we know to an extent what we hope for BPM to achieve at both ends of the Business and IT and we also know that somewhere BPM is tryi