In the past, large IT projects would deploy new applications or upgrades and be considered failures not because the technology failed but because the impact to the business wasn’t fully understood or even considered as a criteria for the success of the project. Similarly, many process improvement initiatives would meet the same fate because they focused on the execution of business tasks and, if technology was considered at all, it was identified for a potential and separate future IT project. Unfortunately by the time the project was approved and the funds allocated the original

It would be easy to come away from a BPM conference thinking the primary objective of business process management is improving human work – making it faster and more productive, less error-prone, more compliant, more flexible and adaptive to changing business needs, and more measurable in support of performance targets. And for many business processes, those are indeed BPM’s goals, both as a management discipline and as a software technology.

Simon Hayward is chief of research for software and a Gartner fellow emeritus. With an interest in the relationship of business processes, software applications and software infrastructure, he oversees research in the software sector and develops integrative activities between research areas. He will deliver the featured analyst keynote address at the Business Process Management Conference in June in San Francisco.