Event

On 13 July 2010, Metastorm, which focuses on business process management (BPM), business process analysis (BPA) and enterprise architecture (EA) software, announced the general availability of two new applications:

• Metastorm M3, a cloud-enabled collaborative modeling suite that includes modeling capabilities for 11 different popular model types.
• Metastorm Smart Business Workspace, a rich Internet application with social collaboration functions that includes featuring Metastorm Widget Designer, which enables nontechnical users to create their own widgets.

Pricing information was not available.

Analysis

The new Metastorm offerings confirm Gartner's view that BPM is a new way of working, rather than a "passing fad." Metastorm offers an example of a BPM vendor promoting BPM disciplines in new directions, including:

• Expanding its perspective on process management beyond simply automation of structured activities to including unstructured activities into orchestrated processes
• Linking process management to business transformation and business performance gains
• Continuing to push for greater business role empowerment in process change control

Since mid-2009, five out of 10 of inquiries we have taken on business process management suites (BPMSs) have indicated that Gartner clients are thinking more strategically about how to transform their businesses and drive higher performance. Increasingly, they want better visibility and management of cross-organizational processes. They also want to optimize key processes to make the most effective use of human resources and to more closely align results with performance targets. Metastorm's new applications aim to support these market needs with nonintrusive, low-cost, intuitive tools, in contrast to traditional BPA and EA tools, which only target IT professionals.

The new Metastorm applications deliver more functionality in critical areas than competitive social BPM offerings (such as IBM Lombardi Blueprint, IBM Blueworks or SoftwareAG's ARISAlign) by combining 11 proven model types from Metastorm ProVision with collaboration technologies, Silverlight user interfaces and social networking. Gartner defines "social BPM" as a concept that describes collaboratively designed and iterated processes, which mirror the way work is performed from a "doer" perspective and experienced from a "receiver" perspective to harness the power of continuous learning from "the collective." The Metastorm M3 Cloud-based environment enables nontechnical business stakeholders to share their perspectives and knowledge and provide input to BPM and business architecture initiatives; however, as yet, this initial release provides little guidance on how to most-effectively engage the collective iteratively, beyond collaborative design (see "Social BPM: Design by Doing" ).

IT organizations: Sign up your leading Visio modelers to try Metastorm M3. Demonstrate to business executives its collaborative capabilities to gather input from the broader "collective" — that is, the occasional, ad hoc stakeholders including partners, customers, infrequent users and auditors.

• "Social BPM: Design by Doing" — Gartner defines "social BPM" and describes the early stages of synergy we have detected across BPM, business process improvement and social software. By Elise Olding, Carol Rozwell and Jim Sinur
• "Social BPM: Techniques to Uncover Process Patterns" — BPM practitioners can use three techniques to uncover process patterns from unstructured processes. By Carol Rozwell and Elise Olding

(You may need to sign in or be a Gartner client to access the documents referenced in this First Take.)