Business Process Management and Workflow Software — Market Definition
The three types of BPM platforms — basic BPM platforms, business process management suites (BPMSs), and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMSs) — can help solution architects and business outcome owners accelerate application development, transform business processes, and digitalize business processes to exploit business moments by providing capabilities that manage different aspects of the business process life cycle.
Please note this disclaimer. I’m affiliated with Tallyfy— a workflow and BPM platform which differentiates through incredible ease-of-use, customer-facing features and flexibility to drive adoption in modern teams.
The image below depicts these three types of platforms, which are described in more detail in “Select the Right Type of BPM Platform to Achieve Your Application Development, Business Transformation or Digital Business Goals.”
BPM is an overarching category of products and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings that features a graphical-model-driven authoring environment and an integrated execution engine for accelerating the development of process-centric applications. In this way, a BPM platform supports the design, implementation and execution phases of the business process reinvention life cycle.
Gartner defines business processes as the coordination of the behavior of people, systems and things to produce specific business outcomes. “Things” in this context refers to devices that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT).
A BPM platform minimally includes:
- A graphical business process and/or rule modeling capability.
- A process registry/repository to handle the modeling metadata.
- A process execution engine and a state management engine or rule engine (or both).
BPM platforms use metadata models to compose an application. They use two approaches to the execution of the metadata model:
- Indirect model-driven applications, in which some, but not all, of the solution behavior is generated from the model. The remainder of the solution requires compilation, translation, or manual coding and composition before it is executable.
- Direct model-driven applications, where nearly 100% of the solution behavior from the model (or models) is executable, with no additional programming. Very little coding or manual effort outside the model is required to change or evolve solution behavior.
Because process changes are immediately executable, BPM platforms that produce direct model driven applications are more appropriate for business processes owned and maintained by citizen developers that involve nonroutine work and dynamically changing processes.
More advanced BPM platforms such as BPMSs and iBPMSs address all phases of the business process reinvention life cycle. These more advanced BPM platforms may also include continuous intelligence, analytics, decisioning and event-handling capabilities. As a result, more advanced BPM platforms can be used for enterprise application development, but they are more useful in support of business transformation, continuous process improvement (CPI), case management, and digitalized processes dynamically executing on business moments.
BPM platforms generally take one of two approaches to application composition: application-centric or process-centric.
- Application-centric — Where the primary goal of the composition platform is to produce an application that automates a process to get work done. The focus here is on the application development life cycle.
- Process-centric — Where the primary goal of the composition platform is to produce an application that not only gets work done, but also helps improve or transform business processes. The focus of these platforms is on the business process life cycle. They help business and IT users manage the “process of process change” to produce specific business outcomes.
Please note this disclaimer. I’m affiliated with Tallyfy— a workflow and BPM platform which differentiates through incredible ease-of-use, customer-facing features and flexibility to drive adoption in modern teams.
BPM Market Direction
Because they leverage model-driven execution, BPM platforms accelerate the time-to-market for an application in a flexible, built-for-change way. Furthermore, as more capabilities like mobile device support, cloud-based process design and/or execution, and service integration become more mature, these platforms are being used to replace traditional application development platforms — as a one-stop shop for building process-intensive applications.
The demand for addressing the need for nonroutine work continues to increase. While many nonroutine tasks can be complemented and augmented by some level of automation, nonroutine work is human-centric. While BPM platforms may have traditionally focused on orchestrating structured processes, the notion of process within a BPM platform need not be confined to a predictable set of actions always executed in the same order. BPM platforms, in particular iBPMSs, have evolved to address ever more dynamic processes that require real-time, continuous intelligence and comprehensive analytic capabilities.
BPM platforms can be used for building all manner of process-centric applications — though, iBPMSs best address the needs of Mode 2, or agile, IT. That is, applications that are business centric and directly support top-line growth through new revenue streams and improved customer experience. Cycle times for changes to the process design and execution can be measured in days or minutes, instead of weeks or months. This rapid evolution of a solution may be outside the comfort zone for many organizations that have more traditional approaches to process improvement and application development.
The BPM platform market is becoming more polarized as two of the three platform categories are attracting the most interest from buyers:
- iBPMS, using intelligence to reduce the time from insight to action.
- Basic BPM platforms, addressing more opportunistic process-centric application development needs
BPMS is a healthy market, but it is a more mature market that is experiencing lower growth as organizations look to optimize business processes for each business moment (a use case better suited to an iBPMS), rather than just standardizing and streamlining processes.
The following factors are driving rampant adoption of basic BPM platforms:
- The BPM immaturity of most organizations curtails their ability to fully leverage more advanced BPM platforms. Organizations continue to struggle with changing their cultures and establishing the correct process improvement methodologies and best practices. Many organizations still struggle to improve business outcomes within a single process or function, much less those that span business and IT silos. Basic BPM platforms can be a way to gain some degree of visibility and control for process-unaware organizations, while laying the foundation for a strategic approach to process management. However, most basic BPM platforms are adopted for tactical, instead of strategic, needs — addressing only the most basic business process improvement scenarios.
- Within the BPM platform market, there is an ever-increasing focus on the citizen developer role in composing a complete, or nearly complete, opportunistic application with little or no involvement from IT development staff. To varying degrees, BPM platforms are increasingly able to deliver on the promise of citizen development in managing the complete business process life cycle.
- BPM platforms are model-driven application composition platforms. Model-driven composition platforms can meet the application development needs for high-productivity application composition that allows the creation of opportunistic applications intended for line-of-business (LOB) developers and IT projects that require rapid, low-cost paths to outcomes.
Demand for more intelligent processes is driving strong adoption of iBPMS. As the market becomes more disruptive and subject to the forces of big change and digital business, and as focus shifts to customer experience, organizations need to dynamically respond to business moments in the course of a digital business process. Each process may be unique and tailored to the requirements of a specific customer during a business moment, within the context of a specific situation. Doing this requires interjecting more intelligence into the process, either through human judgment or software — or, most importantly — through a combination of both.
Each of these three types of BPM platforms is offered as on-premises products, as hosted managed services or as PaaS. Public and private cloud bpmPaaS adoption has become mainstream, with many platforms solely available as a bpmPaaS, and even some pure-play BPM vendors selling more on the cloud than on-premises. Even further organizational agility is enabled by bpmPaaS — allowing new processes to be improved faster and, particularly with cloud-native bpmPaaS, existing processes to scale globally. Early adopters are using bpmPaaS as a mechanism to manage business processes in a hybrid IT environment. As cloud adoption increases, business processes are more likely to be supported by multiple cloud services from multiple providers.
BPM Market Analysis
In Gartner’s definition of a model-driven application, changes to solution behavior are made by altering the metadata model, rather than by changing code, turning switches on or off, or using tables or configuration files. The model is an abstraction that allows IT or citizen developers to more easily manipulate a facet (or multiple facets) of an application. A facet is an aspect of a solution, such as an information model, a process model or a user interface model. The resulting model is an abstraction — it uses data to describe data. In other words, a model-driven application is meta data driven.
Usage Scenarios
Application-centric and process-centric BPM platforms can be used for a number of business process improvement, reinvention or transformation scenarios. This analysis helps you understand which scenarios can be addressed by a BPM platform.
High-productivity opportunistic application composition — In the high-productivity opportunistic application composition (OAC) scenario, citizen developers use the BPM platform to quickly compose an application. The process may include the orchestration of IT services that have preconfigured adapters, but typically orchestration focuses on human-centric tasks. Workflow complexity is low and has limited dynamic behavior (typically isolated to simple decisions that only examine process instance data) or is unstructured, collaborative and ad hoc simple task management.
Application-centric model-driven composition (MDC) basic BPM platforms are often used for OAC, although more advanced process-centric BPMS and iBPMS can be used as well.
Continuous process improvement — In the CPI scenario, the BPM platform is used to measure the business outcome of an existing process and improve the results of the outcome through iterative improvements to the process. The BPM platform is used in conjunction with process methodologies, such as lean and Six Sigma, which have been extensively adopted by manufacturing industries for years. However, in the past decade, many companies in industries such as financial services, healthcare and telecommunications have brought their BPM programs to a CPI level, often adopting lean, Six Sigma or lean Six Sigma as a methodology. CPI typically includes some combination of automation, standardization and reduction of human work — improving existing processes by making them more efficient and effective. Process-centric MDC BPMS and iBPMS are the norm for this scenario.
Intelligent business operations — IBO addresses the challenge of creating smarter, more agile and more innovative processes, which enable organizations to outperform the status quo and exploit new business opportunities. Implementing processes that use operational intelligence results in better decision making and improved knowledge-worker collaboration. IBO-based processes are also “smart” about the context in which they run; they are influenced by events external to the process. The dynamic behavior of the intelligent process is not only driven by process intelligence, the context from the immediate process execution platform, but is also driven by a wider variety of operational intelligence sourced from other external entities (such as ERP, CRM or IoT). Process-centric MDC BPM platforms, in particular iBPMSs, provide the capabilities to support an organization’s ability to implement IBO.
Digitalized process — Digitalized business processes (DPs), formerly known as digitized processes, are a type of intelligent business operations (of intelligent processes) that manage the interaction of people, business and things in digital marketing or digital business. Digitalized processes are designed for change so that these interactions (that is, the work) can be adapted in real time to capitalize on business moments. In this scenario, DP compresses the time it takes to go from contextual insight to action to deliver a unique customer experience or response to the confluence of input from the IoT. A highly intelligent process optimally responds to the unique context presented by business moments. This scenario typically requires a process-centric MDC with full iBPMS capabilities.
Please note this disclaimer. I’m affiliated with Tallyfy — a workflow and BPM platform which differentiates through incredible ease-of-use, customer-facing features and flexibility to drive adoption in modern teams.
Case management — Case management solutions treat a “case” as the primary aspect of work to be managed to a successful outcome. Cases do not progress serially or predictably. There are multiple dependent workflows and associated object types, such as data, content, people, machines and policies. These interdependent relationships are the key architectural challenge. Case management as a process style is now being applied in many sectors beyond government, legal and insurance, including healthcare, banking, higher education and retail. Some solution providers offer cross-industry case management frameworks (CMFs), while others offer industry- and domain specific ones. Case management solutions address four different use cases that use varying degrees of structured and unstructured processes, as well as structured and unstructured data. Many application centric and process-centric MDC BPM platforms support the more ad hoc, event-driven and improvisational case management style of work.
Business Transformation — In this scenario, senior business executives want to make a “game changing” play by rethinking one or more business processes. We see this scenario in organizations worldwide that are strained by significant industry changes brought about by regulatory changes and the global economic recession. BPM technology buyers involved in such transformative initiatives are seeking to redefine their businesses for survival. This scenario is, in many ways, a culmination of the previous use cases but is a significant departure from the current approach to business operations. In recent years, we have seen this BPM scenario in industries such as financial services, real estate development and automobile manufacturing. This scenario requires process-centric MDC and BPMS or iBPMS capabilities.
Further notes on BPM selection and decision making
Select the Platform Type That Addresses Your Full Work Management Needs
CPI scenarios require the ability to manage the complete life cycle of a process instance, which may include a variety of process styles. CPI also requires analysis and optimization capabilities that you will not find in a basic BPM platform — which is primarily focused on simple automation of processes. Use a BPMS, with its support for the entire process life cycle to improve a process for a single function or for structured processes that span functional boundaries. Use an iBPMS to provide the greatest level of dynamic behavior to your work orchestration because of its ability to tie analytics to a more complete operational intelligence context.
Use an iBPMS to Power Your Digital Business
An iBPMS is able to coordinate the work of people, services and things in the form of a digitalized process. An iBPMS provides the ability to respond to real-time, continuous intelligence in a dynamic and intent-driven, contextually sensitive way. IoT sensors and smart machines can provide deeper operational intelligence from across the enterprise — and even partners, suppliers and customers— allowing an organization to respond to the dynamic and event-driven nature of digital business. Many of the capabilities of an iBPMS — like BAM, rules-driven process snippets, predictive analytics and CEP — allow an iBPMS to sense and respond, in real time, to changes in context driven by IoT data/events, as well as interactions with smart machines.
Cloud Considerations Across Use Cases
Consider cloud PaaS vendors for the greatest level of agility and to reduce time to market. Cloud based platforms allow organizations to quickly provision new applications, experiment with potential changes, and challenge hypotheses around what application or process will deliver the best outcome. Select bpmPaaS platforms based on process styles (such as forms-based workflow, straight-through processing, collaboration and social interactions), and invest in bpmPaaS or cloud enabled BPM platforms to support dynamic compositions of hybrid IT application and business process services.
Business Process Lifecycle Management
The business process life cycle includes a number of phases, which should be traversed iteratively and in different sequences. These phases include: discovery, define, design, analyze, simulate, implement, execute, monitor and optimize. The purpose of the business process life cycle in a BPM platform is to govern solution behavior to coordinate the interactions and resources that execute the process to deliver specific business outcomes, help workers discover new ways of varying the process to improve business outcomes, and/or help the software self-adjust to optimize outcomes.
