I don’t see Business Process Automation being used that much any more. Maybe I just don’t read the right articles, but it seems that BPM is the preferred term. Well, I am finding that BPM means too many things to too many people. Some see it as the act of geeky technical implementation while other see it as the management discipline. In 1999, I was responsible for driving BPM as a technical term. In 2005, my team turned it into a management discipline term. Both of these interpretations were right for the time, and today, we consider BPM to be about the management discipline.
Now, BPA… would that be a good way to describe BPM efforts that MUST rely on run-time software tools that we call Business Process Management Technologies (BPMT)? It would help distinguish those who see BPM as ‘the act itself’ and those who think that BPM MUST use technology to implement a process flow map. I was with a company in Texas last week. They said, “We can’t do BPM because we don’t have a process engine.” Well, that’s wrong. BPM can be done without any technology. But what if we used BPA to refer to BPM that specifically targets model-driven, run-time solutions? Would that help or hurt?
Don’t forget that BPA also means Business Process Automation… these terms are heavily overloaded.
I don’t want to start a language war, but we do need some way to distinguish between the class of BPM that involves model-to-engine delivery and the class of BPM that is nothing more than continuous improvement that makes no use of BPMS engines, etc. At least, it would be helpful for some companies in Texas.
Thoughts? How do you distinguish this nuance, or do you even see it as an issue? This is a minor issue of language but it can be a roadblock to communication.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Kevin Spurway // Jun 17, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Of course, to further add to the confusion, BPM is also used to refer to Business Performance Management, which is more a set of methodologies associated with business intelligence (BI) software technologies.
And then there is the discipline of actively monitoring and analyzing running processes using a process state engine, but without actually automating those processes with an execution engine. This is in some ways the intermediate point between BPM-the-methodology and BPM-the-automation-technology. We refer to this capability as “business process intelligence” in our product’s marketing material, but other terms could also apply.
In any case, fertile ground for confusing terminology!
2 David McCoy // Jun 17, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Yes. And BPM meant Business Process Modeling in 1999 when I was trying to get it accepted as Business Process Management. These terms are very popular.
3 Martin R. Gadzinowski Jr. // Jul 2, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I have most commonly seen Business Process Management (BPM) defined as the modeling and evaluating of business processes in the effort of determining how they may be improved.
Business Process Automation (BPA), can be seen as the physical carrying out the actual steps of a particular business process (automatically) in order to improve overall efficiency, and by extension, reducing costs.
BPM does not physically “do” anything other than pinpoint painpoints of a particular business process. Once these pitfalls have been uncovered, there is no mechanism in place by which to improve or otherwise modify the process. An “action layer” is required on top of the BPM layer in order to correct or otherwise improve the performance of the business process.
While most BPA solutions primarily focus on providng this “action layer” to the management of business processes (whether utilizing a BPM tool or not), some solutions act more as platforms providing the modeling, evaluation, and execution of business processes in realtime. These BPA platforms uitilize workflows to document a particular process and call specified conditions and events to dictate how the process flow should be carried out. In addition, good BPA tools provide conditional branching and error-handling so that the BPA solution is reacting and interacting to errors and other dynamic events occuring in the environment of the business process.
While the largest organizations may require separate tools for BPM and BPA, most organizations’ needs are less bureaucratic and more pragmatic. SMBs, for example, do not have the resources to fret over every nuance of a particular process. Instead, they have defined goals and actions that need to be carried out and known issues that interupt or otherwise complicate these processes. BPA is the perfect solution for these organizations as it provides all of the management functionality required to effectively document and analyze the process as well as the ability to automate the proocess in order to improve efficiency and lower overall cost. In addition, using 1 solution for the modeling, evaluation, and execution of a process takes less of a toll on IT departments and is an added cost savings benefit.
4 A Personal History of BPM // Jul 6, 2009 at 7:31 pm
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