The State of Business Process Management (BPM)

Good friend Rashid Khan, the inventor of the term BPM (Business Process Management) continues his educational blog on the industry, see here.  From one of his entries I found valuable:

"So what is the state of the BPM industry today? Here are some revealing facts:

• No pure-play BPM vendor is big enough or strong enough financially to go public, though several continue to threaten for several years now that they will soon. It does not happen, even while every year the analysts continue to forecast rapid growth in the industry and among the leaders.
• We keep hearing every other year that the big players such Oracle, Microsoft and SAP will make major inroads in to the BPM market, but that also has not happened.
• Gartner, after having pushed BPM, simulations, “round-tripping”, and SOA, is now on to a new gig called “Pattern Based Strategies” to further confuse their already confused customers, which is always good for their business. (see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/11/18/how-will-bpm-deal-with-pattern-based-strategies-pbs/ )
• All this while Gartner admits that the most important “hot questions” their clients ask are basic BPM 101 questions such as “1. What are the benefits of BPM?” and “2. How should I get started?” (see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/26/what-are-the-hot-questions-in-bpm/ ) Makes one wonder why companies are paying Gartner money for answering such basic questions, unless they are totally confused!
• There is no slowdown in the number of new entrants to the BPM market, which indicates that the market is still largely open with no strong leaders, and no sign of consolidation, contrary to all predictions. "
  

Rashid Khan and Business Process Management

While at Procter & Gamble, I became interested in exploring how to take the company out of Workflow and into something closer to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for business management. Of course, Franz Dill and I joined forces on it who had led multiple efforts in this field at the soap company. See Franz's AI expertise here.

If time allows, I will cover the learning from the research at a later point in time.

AI is still a ways away, yet research led me to the market place of Business Process Management (BPM). I wanted to meet the person who first thought of it and digging through the noise of perceptions and self-proclamantions, I discovered Mr. Rashid Khan who had coined the term "Business Process Management" when he founded Ultimus in 1994 - a BPM software solution company. See here some of Rashid's patents.

Rashid took Ultimus from an idea to I believe now delivering solutions in 80 countries. Rashid also wrote a good primer on BPM called "Business Process Management: A Practical Guide", see here. Franz wrote about the book in a blog, "Good, mostly non-technical overview and easy read... BPM can be seen as a way of modeling processes within a corporation, along with the people who do the work. It has been criticized for too strongly regimenting process steps."

Rashid recently left Ultimus after 14 years to pursue a new venture - a consultancy for senior executives called Leadership BPM. He is also blogging here.