What makes BPM attractive?

Business Process Management (BPM) is the new watchword in corporate organizations across geographical boundaries. A Gartner Research estimates that by 2009, 20% of the business processes of Global 2000 companies will be supported by Business Process Management software. This translates to a global market worth $4 billion.

What makes BPM such an attractive proposition that makes over 140 companies world over seek a piece of it? To answer this question, one must understand the concept of BPM and how it differs from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Business Process Management

The term Business Process Management has two definitional aspects - one with a business focus and the second with technology focus. On the business side, BPM represents a discipline that views all business processes as organizational building blocks, and uses a structured approach to create, deploy and optimize these processes. On the technology front, BPM represents a set of tools called Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that provide IT functionality to achieve BPM’s business aims.

What's the Difference?

It appears that BPM has some features that ERP, workflow management and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions have been offering for many years now. So what makes BPM different?

The early 1990s saw an onslaught of ERP solutions striving to provide best market practices as pre-integrated platforms. However, these solutions require long implementation cycles and organizations were stuck with standardized, inflexible ERP platforms that could not deliver on their promises.

IT heads also tried working with a mix of packaged solutions (such as ERP, CRM and SCM), along with customized, proprietary products that were developed internally. However, this approach yielded complex system environment with expensive integration to maintain or, alternatively, islands of automation.

Going forward, organizations were clear in finding a cost-effective way or solution to deliver flexible IT solutions that accommodate constant business process changes, for which BPM was the only answer.

By using BPM tools to detail, manage and manipulate processes quickly, IT departments reinvented itself from being "spenders" to "cost controllers” and organizations gained a level of control and flexibility which helped reduce costs and improve response to service demands.

The Opportunity

According to Forrester Research, as enterprises seek to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and strategic value of key business processes; BPMS license, services, and maintenance revenue from software vendors will grow from $1.2 billion in 2005 to more than $2.7 billion by 2009, which is more than a 21 per cent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR). Since processes span a wide range of requirements, it is no surprise that BPMS provide varying degrees of support for human interaction, system, application integration, document processing, and complex decision-making. Although products increasingly overlap, enterprises may need more than just one BPMS to address all types of business processes.

Growing Importance for BPM

A recent BPM study conducted by IDS Scheer and the IT market analysis consultant PAC, the Business Process Report 2006, reveals that the concept of business process management has become indispensable at mid-size and large organizations. 80 percent of the surveyed organizations are either deeply or very deeply committed to the concept of business process management. And when compared with previous years, the proportion of companies that are deeply involved with the concept has even hit a record high of 55 percent.

• The most important issues are - increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving process effectiveness and innovation.

• Optimization to enhance performance and cost reduction are the most important strategic objectives of business process management.

The Road to a rewarding future

BPM leads the way towards commoditizing and automating business processes. According to a Forrester Industry report the "BPM market is hot and is getting hotter with the worldwide market growing at a projected compounded annual growth rate of more than 20 per cent till 2009".

This is a good opportunity for those looking for a rewarding career in the BPM sector. It offers software professionals the chance to learn all about business and supporting IT systems, while keeping technology alongside. This is one of the reasons for the less rate of attrition among BPM professionals who work on BPM projects and consequently job satisfaction is also quite high.

Required Skill sets

Lomabardi, Savvion, Fuego, JBoss BPM Specialists require work experience in any of the following suites:

• Lombardi TeamWorks v5.x

• Savvion BusinessManager v6.x

• Aqualogic BPM (Fuego) Version 5.x - Feugo Architecture (Standalone and J2EE Versions), FBI, PAPI APIs, BAM and Archiving

• Jboss BPM

And Rules Specialists require experience in LOG or Blaze Advisor technology.

HR Challenges

The Business Process Management (BPM) market is one of the fastest growing areas for technology spending. But as and when the complexity and breadth of BPM solutions expand and the scope of projects grow larger it is becoming increasingly difficult to find individuals with the right skill sets required to implement them. Although the BPM market is very buoyant, there are relatively very few projects overall and resulting with a small number of candidates with deep product knowledge. The extended scope of BPM projects also mean that resources are being stretched and it is increasingly unrealistic to expect resources to possess all the required skill sets. All of this means that Employers may need to look more creatively at teambuilding to fulfill a range of different project roles and cross training to acquire specific package skills. The success of the BPM space entirely depends on the ability to produce the right talent.

Sridhar Chandrasekar is Director (Marketing) at Virtusa Corporation.

e-mail id: srichandra@virtusa.com

CIOL Bureau