Jim Sinur

I would say that most folks buy BPM to save money and/or time. This is the initial justification. Those that are more enlightened, leverage processes for better business goals such as simulating resource alternatives, managing the customer experience and supporting a strong set of value chains. There are also those that want to use process as a way to increase their reputation and/or outflank their competition. These are all logical reasons for using BPM. I think deep down we find BPM visually appealing.

Let’s think about where most organizations start with BPM. They either want to model their processes visually to see the reality of their processes and get hooked on trying to make them better while more visually appealing or they want to monitor them to have some technology draw a jump start model. It’s because for the most part humans are stimulated through their visual senses. It could be good looking people, good looking fashion, sleek cars, environmentally seductive home sites, art on the walls at home and the beauty of a little child. Face it, BPM is just good looking. Some times it’s difficult to differentiate vendor offerings because they do stimulate the visual senses, but believe me, there are lots of differences. While the modeling and business activity monitoring components are quite similar, there are significant differences in how each vendor deals with agility, optimization and change.

While BPM has not reached semiotic perfection, it is moving towards visual beauty. As optimization techniques start to include more sophisticated optimization algos (mathematical algorithms) to help organizations get more out of their processes, they will unwittingly move to math that can generate artistic forms. The recent IBM acquisition of SPSS adds the power of predictive analytics. Examples include fractals. I have tried to paint one myself as my first painting project.

See: http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/12/19/happy-holidays-fantasies-and-fractals-dance-in-jims-head/

I have to admit that I am biased as a budding artist toward the visual world. See some more of my stuff:

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/05/28/setting-a-foundation-for-bpm-extends-jump-start-benefits/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/02/10/trees-on-my-mind/

I believe that competing with BPM will lead to gaming interfaces to represent the power of the BPM adventure. Tomorrows leaders will come with a bent towards gaming and I bet BPM picks it up. Since I really believe that BPM will become more visual and two of my sons, Andy and Dave, are in the games industry I have dug into computer animation. The first foray was in a movie that I produced where my son did some of the special effects (The Falls)

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382687/

I believe one of the subtle reasons that BPM moves forward is its evolving visual appeal. Visual appeal is a pursuit worthy of the journey in my biased opinion.