The Evolution of Intelligent BPM

To be able to understand the chances or the opportunities that come with the adoption of Intelligence Business Process Management, it is significant to consider the stages that the process has gone through over time over the last decades. During the technology phase that started in the mid-90s, the management of business process was only limited to repetitive sequencing of acts with tough applications such as the ERP systems. Any introduction of a complex degree of workflow management only led to imposition of other costs of integration that accounted to more than 80 percent of the project costs with no chance of recycling or reusing. In addition, the integration was limited to data retrieval documentation.

These early process management initiatives often focused on integrating and automating repetitive processes, generally within standardized environments. Whether focused on Straight-Through Processing transactions or a discrete process such as Account Activation, these are applications where the flow and sequence of activities is predetermined and immutable. The role of exception handling here is to allow human intervention to quickly resolve or correct a break in the flow of an otherwise standard process.

By the end of the 1990s, however, BPM had emerged as an identifiable soft-ware segment, a superset of workflow management distinguished in part by allowing process management independent of any single application. This was enabled by managing application execution instructions separate from pro-cess flows, so processes could be defined without limitation to single applica-tion, as well as through support for variable versus hard-wired process flow paths.

The first wave of BPM deployments were typically aimed at bridging the island of automation described above, such as closing gaps in existing ERP deploy-ments. Early BPM solutions were differentiated by integration-centric func-tionality, such as application adapters, data transformation capabilities and product-specific process definitions (e.g., an order-to-cash process).

Eventu-ally, the introduction of standards such as Web Services and advances in the development tools within BPM suites lowered the cost and complexity of data integration. This began to shift the fundamental value proposition of BPM from discrete capabilities to enabling the management of business logic by business process managers, without threatening the integrity of the application logic (the infrastructure that is rightfully managed and protected by IT personnel).

The availability of standards-based protocols significantly lowered the burden on BPM adopters for building and maintaining integration infrastructure, free-ing time and resources to focus on the process and business performance, rather than being consumed with plumbing issues. Over time this facilitated a refocus of process management software from that of automation and inte-gration to orchestration and coordination, bringing BPM into the realm of business optimization.

Business environments are dynamic, requiring the business systems that support them to be so as well. This means that systems must be able to easily adapt to changing business circumstances. Phase Two of the BPM opportunity was presented through making orchestration a real-ity—the ability to connect abstracted application capabilities across orches-trated business processes, thereby transforming existing automation infra-structure into reusable business assets.