Process Management

Wikipedia defines BPM as a field of knowledge at the intersection between Management and Information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.

“Think of BPM as simply technology-enabled support for business interactions, much like email is technology-enabled support for business communications”
-Peter Fingar, Extreme Competition

The classic scribbling on a dinner napkin as shown here is where great ideas begin. Often enough, these ideas are around process improvements that consist of activities to meet a specific goal such as faster processing of an application.

When you start thinking about why it takes too many steps for a task to be accomplished or wonder why you have to enter the same data in 2 or more different systems, you come to a realization that things could be better and faster if only the systems and human tasks could be combined somehow without costing an arm and leg. This mindset is what Erwin calls “get it done faster, better, and cheaper” paradigm. With today’s BPM, SOA, and Mashup software, this goal can be achieved if implemented successfully.

“Whenever a program did not deliver the anticipated benefits, the problem was not a skill or knowledge deficit. Invariably, the problem was related to the underlying business process.”
-Andrew Spanyi, More for Less and Business Process Management is a Team Sport