BPM: Modeling the process

by Ross Milburn

May 4, 2006 —

According to research firm Gartner, there are more than 130 vendors of Business Process Management BPM software. BPM is hot because it delivers a decades-old dream: that businesspeople who are non-programmers can modify their business applications, and even create new ones, with little or no assistance from the IT department. With BPM, applications are created faster and cheaper, but because they are accurately modeled before they are created, they should not require extensive trials.

A BPM-enabled application differs from a conventional one in that it comes as part of a suite, with a toolset that can be used to examine and change the underlying process used in the application. In particular, the business rules used to make decisions are explicitly listed, and by changing them, the user can redesign the application.

BPM deals with real-world business processes which naturally include a mixture of software applications, human interactions and other technologies. Since businesspeople know what they want all these systems to do, they can use the graphical tools in a BPM suite to model a process, and then run a simulation to make sure it does what is expected. When the simulation behaves as desired, it can be automatically turned into code without the intervention of a programmer.

Converging workflow and applications

BPM has evolved to fill a need, as Michael White, product marketing manager of Singularity, explains: "In the 1990s people became familiar with, on one hand,

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