BPM: forget about the hype
The Xpragmatic View #52
February 2003
by Marc Buyens, Xpragma
Download as PDF-file 
The popularity of BPM-like approaches and solutions is steadily increasing. Some of the major analyst groups, not to name Gartner, are increasingly positioning BPM as a key concept for the business practices of the coming years. As can expected, most IT-vendors got the message...
From a technology point of view, 2002 wasn't the year of the major product introductions. Of course, the past year hasn't been the easiest one for most IT-vendors. The sluggish economic conditions resulted in an overall market slowdown where projects were postponed, cancelled or re-focused on more down-to-earth needs. Risk-avoidance was (and still is) at an all-time high. Not surprisingly, the R&D expenditure of a lot of software vendors was seriously downscaled, further decreasing the rate of introduction of new solutions and functionality.
In such a difficult business climate, new announcements are often limited to the re-packaging of existing products or to some change in the marketing message. In some cases, this really reflects a deliberate re-positioning of the company. However in most cases, it simply is a way of generating some additional marketing messages without changing much of the real offering.
The latter is what we have seen most over the past months. Few new directions, few new product introductions, but a lot of marketing hype that spread the BPM-word. Especially within the group of major EAI-vendors, numerous BPM-related publications and seminars emerged since the beginning of this year.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with this increased focus on BPM. I fully agree with Gartner's view that BPM is getting increasingly important. I also am convinced that EAI is a group of technologies and approaches than can play a vital role addressing the challenge of the BPM-paradigm. However, I would prefer that technology vendors would be a bit more realistic while promoting the capabilities of their product.
In 1999, when I published my first EAI Status Report, I used the following simple diagram to depict the overall architecture that we were talking about:
At that moment, most vendors' offering was merely addressing the lower two layers. Some limited component-level functionality was emerging and the upper business process layer was still a faraway dream.
Since then, this offering has gradually evolved and today, several vendors can rightfully claim that they are also addressing (parts of) the upper two layers. One example of such evolution is the support for web services that can be found in most products, which can be viewed as being some form of component-level support. However, in many cases this level of support is not much more than the availability of some kind of adapter technology that allows some form of interaction with the web service. Unfortunately, this is only a minor extension of the lower layers.
In a similar way, most vendors overstate the capabilities of their offering at the business process level. In many cases, these capabilities are limited to the design and the configuration of the specific parts of the business process where some form of data integration has to occur. Therefore, such functionality is more like systems management at the technical level instead of a real reconfiguration of business logic, as the marketing talk goes.
Whatever the level of support that is available today, the real important question is whether today's integration technologies provide a suitable platform for the needs of BPM. Indeed, most broker suites have been developed with a clear focus on the data integration task: avoidance of the n-to-n integration spaghetti and centralisation of common functions (data transformation, etc.). Not withstanding the value of these architectures, is there any guarantee that they can also address the extended needs of BPM?
How do these solutions address the complexity of long-running transactions? How do they address the increasing complexity of distributed environments spanning multiple organisations? How do they address the challenge of distributed management and control? Reality is that many of these issues are only partially addressed in today's offering.
Another group of players are the providers of workflow and "native" BPM solutions. Their focus is less on the underlying data integration, but rather of the highest layers of our model. Often, these are very specialised solutions, focusing on a specific domain or environment. Some other solutions have their roots in yet another problem domain (e.g. document management).
Again, they all offer a solution that addresses parts of the challenge, but as for today, none of these approaches or technologies is really able to address the complexity of enterprise-wide BPM. Even in more narrowly defined domains such as process analysis, a combination of multiple products might be required.
A solution such as the ARIS-suite of IDS Scheer might be your best choice for your BPM analysis and management needs at an architectural and procedural level. However, you might prefer a tool such as ProVision to assist you with the decision-making process at a strategic level. When your focus is on process discovery, then you might go for an approach such as the one promoted by ProActivity. And the list goes on...
It is clear that even in such a small sub-segment of BPM, there is not yet the ultimate "best choice". Of course, there might be a "best" choice given your current needs and budget, but every choice will have some drawbacks.
Management is always reluctant to the idea of buying more than one product for the "same" need. However, reality is that there are few really look-alike products. Most offerings have a few key strengths that are real differentiators compared to competing products. However, these strengths are often hidden behind a multitude of rather average and mediocre features that make it a "general" BPM product. I assume this is an attempt to broaden the target market, but in my opinion, it would be better if companies kept a clear product focus and made such focus also clearly visible in their marketing messages.
As a result, your current BPM-approach will have to remain a tactical one, possibly based upon a combination of complementary offerings. Thereby, a major challenge remains the lack of real standards, especially when you want to think about inter-company BPM.
Of course, there is a multitude of approaches and so-called standards. However, none of them reaches an acceptance level that is similar to something like XML (and we all know that "standard" XML still is a faraway dream). Initiatives such as the one driven by BPMI.org might be able to alleviate this problem. However is this the right direction? Is this not going too much into the direction of SCOR-like approaches?
Initiatives such as the Supply Chain Council's SCOR-methodology can bring clear value. They promote a common understanding, a common language and a solid basis for interoperability. However, is this not going too much into the direction of uniformity, look-alike approaches and lack of competitive differentiation? Will this give us business agility or is it just a more organised way to view, access and reconfigure our ERP-environments?
In addition, we have to face the reality that today's offering, be it EAI, workflow or native BPM-based, mostly focuses on the execution of repeatable business tasks and the management of the associated data flows. But this is only a subset of what business process management really encompasses. What about the "real" customer experience? How do these products enable or support strategic change and innovation? How far can we go in the management and the control of our processes, without limiting their inherent flexibility?
A lot of questions, but very few answers today. Therefore, we will have to live quite a bit longer with a lot of pseudo-BPM approaches and the hype that goes with it. Mergers or take-overs that would group a number of vendors with complementary technologies might speed-up the process. However, today's economic conditions are not really optimal for such evolution. Worse, a lot of innovation and potential is currently frozen or even lost due to the lack of suitable funding and the avoidance of risk.
Nevertheless, the BPM promise will come one day and very likely in a very different form than what we know today. Marketing hype can cloud our thinking for a while, but cannot bring us the real solutions we need. Sooner or later some really innovative concepts will emerge that will become the future building blocks for process-oriented business management. Meanwhile, buy and build strategic at the integration infrastructure level, learn and increase your knowledge level about general BPM concepts and approaches, but buy tactical.
Have fun...
ARIS - IDS Scheer - www.ids-scheer.com
BPMI.org - Business Process Management Initiative - www.bpmi.org
ProActivity - ProActivity Inc. - www.proactivityinc.com
ProVision - Proforma Corporation - www.proformacorp.com
SCOR - Supply Chain Council - www.supply-chain.org
Categories: Business Process Management (BPM)
RSS feed: http://www.xpragma.com/english/rss/xpven.xml
