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BPMS Watch: Understanding and Evaluating BPM Suites

BPM provides more than just a new way of measuring and understanding your business.  It also delivers a new technology platform that is critical to realizing the innovation, efficiency, compliance, and agility that BPM promises.  That platform, called a BPM Suite (BPMS), supports the complete process implementation lifecycle, from modeling to implementation design, execution, and business activity monitoring, with feedback to modeling for continuous performance improvement. 

BPMS offerings have matured greatly in the past year or two.  Today most provide a unified design environment for executable process activities, from interactive tasks to automated functions on backend systems.  Most provide a way to create business rules that can be managed centrally and applied across business processes in the organization.  Most provide tools to build dynamic forms and portals, integrate with diverse business systems, and create dashboards of process performance… all without writing code.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is there are so many offerings to choose from, and they all advertise the same basic value proposition and the same functional building blocks.  But BPM Suites are not all the same.  They are oriented to different types of processes – basic task routing, production workflow, collaborative case management, or integration-centric automation – so they emphasize different features within that common set of building blocks.  The end user experience, for example, or how work is distributed, or how backend systems are integrated, or how exceptions are handled… all vary dramatically from one offering to another, because the central design point of each BPMS vendor is slightly different.

BPM Suites also differ on how business and IT interact in the implementation cycle.  Traditionally, business wrote requirements – perhaps supported by modeling – and IT interpreted those as best it could in the implementation.  One style of business-IT interaction retains that essential handoff, but allows the models created by business analysts to create artifacts used as a starting point for the actual implementation.  This creates a cleaner handoff from business to IT, and gives business a more direct role in the implementation.

The other style is a radical break from traditional implementation, and is a unique benefit of BPMS technology.  Process modeling and executable design actually share the same process diagram, often the same tool, so that instead of a handoff, IT simply layers technical detail on top of the process structure defined by business.  The model always remains a “business view” of the process implementation.  This enables a rapid iterative implementation style that is increasingly attractive to business.

The BPMS Report series, created by Bruce Silver Associates, drills through the veneer of sameness to illustrate the true personalities of today’s leading BPMS offerings – for example, which features are richly elaborated out of the box, and which business-IT interaction style is supported.  Each report in the series covers a single offering in around 30 pages, including 30-40 diagrams and screenshots.  All reports follow the same outline and analytical framework, allowing true apples-to-apples comparison.  Best of all, they are available for free through BPM Institute.  Last year’s reports, covering 10 vendors, received over 12,000 downloads.  This year’s reports will cover at least that many products. 

The first wave of 7 reports became available in early July. These reports cover Appian, BEA Systems, Cordys, FlowCentric, Global 360, TIBCO, and webMethods. A second wave, including IBM (WebSphere and FileNet), Lombardi, EMC, Oracle, and Adeptia is planned for the end of July.
Also around the end of July, we will publish a comparative evaluation of all of the BPM Suites covered in the reports, with separate scoring for each process type.  A summary of the scoring will be available for free through BPM Institute.  Detailed scoring will be available through Bruce Silver Associates.

Bruce Silver (bruce[at]brsilver.com) is an independent industry analyst covering BPMS technology and the author of the 2006 BPMS Report series on bpminstitute.org. Read the BPMS Watch blog at www.brsilver.com/wordpress.

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