To better control business processes, many companies are developing applications that facilitate collaboration across organizations and systems. IT groups, however, are finding that their existing application development platforms are not well suited to the requirements of process-centric applications. These requirements include an ability to change rapidly and simply, a collaborative design environment for business and IT to work together on requirements refinement, and process-specific functions that speed deployment and simplify maintenance.

In response, many of the application development platforms — like IBM's WebSphere, BEA's Weblogic, and Microsoft .NET — have started to include BPM components in their platform. However, more components just create more complexity — more elements to keep in synch during change and increasingly complex requirements to validate.

BPM Opportunity

In order to deploy process-centric applications, many IT groups are turning to BPM as a complement to their existing application development platform. They are doing this to be able to better collaborate with business teams in process development and keep pace with the required changes as processes evolve.

One of the key benefits of implementing BPM is that, like successful application development environments, BPM serves as a platform for deploying any number of process-centric applications. Our customers have chosen to develop process-centric solutions with BPM instead of with application development environments and are realizing the following benefits:

• Deploy solutions faster. Out-of-the-box support for task portals, performance reports and scoreboards, task escalation, and other crucial BPM elements speeds time to delivery of a process centric application.
• End-to-end visibility and control. Reports showing bottlenecks in the end-to-end process give managers real-time control — the basis for continuous process improvement.
• Enable collaborative solution development. A collaborative design environment facilitates shared understanding of process requirements across business and IT users — a critical elements of deployment success.
• Actionable activity monitoring. Ability to easily link activity monitoring in systems and message queues directly with processes provides a proactive event-driven architecture.
• Leverage existing infrastructure. Support for standards like Web services, XML, J2EE, .NET allows BPM solutions to integrate seamlessly with existing development and execution environments.
• Respond to change effectively. Revise processes to respond to organizational or regulatory changes — in days if necessary — without requiring coding and redeployment of entire applications.

Lombardi In Action

One global life sciences company used BPM to deploy a process solution instead of developing using their existing application development environment. While the implementation time was quicker, the most important benefit of using BPM was that it enabled a more iterative development process. Within a single 80-day deployment, the development team was able to conduct 4 solution reviews with the business users. This helped ensure alignment of deliverables and led to a complete revision of the requirements — while still meeting the deployment date and cost.