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.

Information technology has come under attack from many quarters since the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Yet another blow was struck recently in Harvard Business Review’s sensationally titled article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”†. The IT community, still smarting from a two year slump in business volume and an unprecedented slide in stock prices, was quick to rebut the article’s contention that IT may no longer be the basis for competitive advantage. The wave of rebuttals included comments by industry luminaries such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Intel’s Craig Barrett, and even gave impulse to a book by Smith and Fingar, IT Doesn’t Matter – Business Processes Do.††