Business process management (BPM) treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and business agility. BPM helps companies preserve capital, identify threats, minimize risks, streamline processes and even transform businesses. Several forces are driving the adoption of BPM as a primary approach for business process improvement in today's volatile economy:
- The Internet has enabled hyperconnected enterprises, which operate in a global economy and encounter events that constantly trigger the need for process change. As a result, business process revision cycle times are compressing. Traditional applications are often an inhibitor to business agility.
- Business leaders need visibility into operational processes to fix bottlenecks, find the root cause of process errors and be less dependent on scarce IT resources. As process revision cycle times shorten and IT budgets are slashed, the IT backlog grows ever larger.
- Regulatory and compliance requirements are driving the need for greater operational visibility and transparency, and for process owner accountability.
- Companies struggle with the perennial problem of closing the gap between their strategic goals and the operational execution and achievement of their goals.
- To survive in this turbulent economy, companies must improve operational efficiencies to sustain profit margins and commitments to stakeholders.
Gartner's 2009 BPM Research Agenda
Key Issue: What does BPM success look like? Background and Context of the Key Issue In some ways, BPM is no different from any other management effort. Technology is only a small part of the problem. Changing the behavior of process participants is the bigger challenge. Projects can get bogged down in organizational politics and can lose the way amid a swamp of change management and communication techniques. Some organizations get mired in debates about who should drive the effort, who should own the end-to-end process, how to define processes, and how to prioritize which process improvement efforts to tackle first. Yet, there are some organizations that understand BPM and can sustain continuous process improvement. The intent of this Key Issue is to provide guidelines and tools to help organizations cope with the thorny problems of getting started with BPM, effecting organizational change and using appropriate technologies, as well as staffing and maturing BPM efforts.
Organizations need best practices to emulate others' successes and to learn from others' mistakes. We've harvested best practices from real-life BPM projects and turned them into actionable guidelines and Toolkits that provide a solid foundation for your organization's success with BPM.
Summary of the Planned Research We will create a series of case studies, how-to guides, and Toolkits describing how to establish and sustain BPM projects and programs to continuously improve business processes and demonstrate high-value business results.
Relevant Published Research
Key Issue: How do you use BPM to build an agile organization? Background and Context of the Key Issue In today's fast-paced markets, organizations need to improve their agility — "the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to change." Taking a more process-centric approach to management and to solution implementation has improved process agility for many organizations. This Key Issue focuses on the skills and capabilities required to become process-centric and more agile.
IT and business leaders are experiencing changes beyond what they normally can absorb and respond to within tighter time frames. They have established competencies in managing the known, but now need to anticipate the unknown, assess the efficacy of response options and execute in tightly compressed time frames. In many cases, the risk of no response is higher than the risk of an imperfect response.
Summary of the Planned Research We will reveal the organizational structures that promote agility, and identify the technologies and methodologies most conducive to process agility. We will also examine the use of agile software development methods in BPM initiatives.
Relevant Published Research
Key Issue: How does BPM help organizations manage internally and externally triggered change? Background and Context of the Key Issue The only constant is change. What is disconcerting to many organizations is the increasing amount and frequency of change in the business environment — both require a rapid and effective business response. Customer and partner/supplier requirements change frequently. Regulatory and compliance requirements change all the time. Lately, economic volatility has wreaked havoc in markets, changing the competitive landscape on a daily basis. Gartner primary research shows that companies that use BPM do so because they expect their business processes to change monthly, weekly or even daily (see "Toolkit: Benchmarking Your Organization's BPM Adoption Against BPM Adoption Trends"). Most IT departments can't cope with this pace of change. At the same time, businesses can't afford for IT to be a bottleneck to change. Our research relating to this Key Issue examines how BPM can be used to effectively manage an organization's response to change and addresses areas such as business process modeling, process discovery, event processing, business activity monitoring, social networking and the impact of constant change on the software development life cycle. This Key Issue also looks at how organizations trigger their own process changes as they become clearer about process requirements and optimize their work over time.
Organizations need to be able to sense change and interpret the impact of that change to develop an effective response. Business processes provide the context for interpreting the implications of change and for identifying the best response from a set of alternatives. Working within the governance structures established with IT, BPM empowers businesses to rapidly implement process changes and avoid IT backlogs.
Summary of the Planned Research We will investigate the synergies among the BPM suite (BPMS), business intelligence (BI), business activity monitoring (BAM), B2B and business rule technologies. In addition, we will explore how these provide a robust foundation and enable process stakeholders to sense and effectively respond to continuous changes in the business environment.
Relevant Published Research
Key Issue: What are the best BPM practices to ensure desired business outcomes? Background and Context of the Key Issue Companies no longer have the luxury of funding efforts that may succeed eventually. They want guaranteed business results in shorter time frames. This Key Issue details the best practices organizations should use to ensure that BPM efforts align with business objectives, and it provides guidelines that help organizations avoid the pitfalls and roadblocks to delivering business results with BPM. Additionally, this Key Issue identifies when BPM is the most appropriate option for business process improvement, which management disciplines and technologies you will need to master, and how you can develop the skills needed to sustain continuous process improvement efforts. Business processes don't just stop at the boundaries of your enterprise. They span across your enterprise, partners, suppliers, business process outsourcing providers, software as a service (SaaS) vendors, and cloud computing service providers. This Key Issue integrates Gartner research spanning multiple management and technology disciplines.
Although managing constant change is a necessity, many organizations are daunted by the challenges and risks, particularly when delivering concrete business results is more important than ever before. Research related to this Key Issue illuminates the obstacles to successful BPM, so organizations can pursue a clearer, more-certain path to improved business results.
Summary of the Planned Research We will provide decision frameworks, case studies and tools that integrate best practices from enterprise architecture, project portfolio management, application development, sourcing, workforce management and service-oriented architecture (SOA) disciplines. Our planned research will also evaluate the role of different business process management technologies, such as business process analysis (BPA), automated process discovery, BPM, BPMS, composition environments and model-driven business applications, in delivering business process improvement results.
Relevant Published Research
Key Issue: What are the criteria for evaluating BPM products and services, and who are the leading vendors? Background and Context of the Key Issue The prior Key Issues show how much we believe that BPM is a management discipline and, in many respects, how it is becoming a "way of life" for process-driven organizations. However, BPM cannot separate itself from the realm of technology (for example, the BPMS, which is quite central to the BPM effort), nor can many BPM efforts be effectively delivered without well-skilled service providers helping along the way (for example, training, implementation services and change management services). BPM vendor analysis is a core feature of our research agenda.
There are many types of products and services, and myriad vendors that offer BPM capabilities What technology or service offering is most appropriate to support your process management needs — from incremental improvements to redesign to process transformation — is an important concern for BPM practitioners.
Summary of the Planned Research We will extend our how-to research with updated analysis for assessing BPM products and service providers. We will continue to advise on the BPMS's technological evolution and its main vendors. We will research adjacent areas of technological interest, such as business rule management systems, agility, BPA tools and emerging "hot spots," such as automated process discovery, process mining and process optimization engines. Additionally, we will report on the capabilities of BPM consultancies and SaaS and cloud service providers that leverage BPM technologies. We will also continue to research BPM market dynamics (for example, "Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2007-2012, Update"). Finally, because BPM is a broad topic, related Gartner research agendas (for example, application integration) will also deliver arrows to the competitive analysis quiver as organizations prepare to hunt the full range of process-aware vendors.
Relevant Published Research
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