Attendees at the 2004 Business Process Management conferences held in Chicago and San Francisco indicated their company’s desire to transform themselves into process-centric organizations and considered this transformation to be critical to the company’s future success.

Process modeling is a method of showing the processes of an organization in graphical form to simplify the work of understanding those processes. Ken Orr uses a number of different models to cut through the IT process maze and overcome the organizational bias the always runs against process reform. Working with the Kansas Department of Transportation, (KDOT) Orr was able to greatly improve and streamline their business processes.

Ken Orr is an internationally recognized expert on business process reengineering, technology transfer, software engineering, data warehousing, and knowledge management. He is the founder and Principal Researcher of The Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization.

In an ideal world, companies would run their businesses as if their application portfolio were a single application. This application would take orders, generate shipping notices, and manage accounts receivable. It would also run manufacturing processes, automatically replenish materials as necessary, and exist as a Web-based front-end for customer interaction. Instead, the real world is populated with silos of data that don’t interact, and gaggles of independent applications that defy efforts to unify processes across the enterprise.

You’ve no doubt noticed increased interest in applying Business Process Management (BPM) technology to solve business problems. With success stories appearing in trade publications with growing frequency, an increasing number of technical and business people alike are asking how to take BPM applications to the next level. Are you ready to take BPM to the next level? Before immediately saying, “Of course,” let’s consider the rapidly evolving BPM landscape.

Business Process Management projects often end up as “shelfware” for a number of reasons: lack of identifying process goals, misunderstanding the processes themselves, vague initiatives and lack of organization-wide understanding and support. Tammy Adams identifies the main reasons for failure and the necessary steps to follow in order to make process improvement work.