Business Process Management (BPM) will become more dynamic and used more by knowledge workers, forecasts a Gartner report.
The Gartner research made five predictions about where BPM is headed in 2010 and beyond. Overall, Gartner research vice president Janelle Hill saw BPM growing in acceptance.
“The BPM market continues to be a healthy market. Even in 2009, many vendors had a decent year. One of the really big changes was the acquisition of Lombardi by IBM and Savvion by Progress Software. These two acquisitions coming so quick is a big indicator finally that the market is moving from what Geoffrey Moore called the early majority to the late majority stage,” said Hill.
She anticipated more acquisitions and BPM companies announcing they would go public this year. The move to becoming a “late majority” technology would also act as confirmation to CIOs that the technology is sound and an area where they should invest.
Hill identified two broad areas of change in the market. “We’re predicting that companies will finally begin to recognise that process management is not just about automating routine, repetitive, well-understood structured parts of work, but more importantly, about supporting knowledge workers whose work is much less structured,” said Hill.
One of the biggest challenges to addressing this issue will be resistance from the knowledge workers themselves. But rather than replacing what they do with an automated task, BPM will augment their jobs – helping them to coordinate or monitor what they are doing more effectively.
The second area of innovation this year and beyond will be the use of graphical modelling by business people. In the same way that business people now use spreadsheets, they will increasingly begin to use modelling techniques in their regular reports. By 2014, Gartner predicted that 40% of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 organisations would use business process models to support their everyday tasks, up from 6% in 2009.
Other predictions included the greater use of business process networks. By 2014, business process networks (BPNs) was forecast to underpin 35% of new multi-enterprise integration projects. By 2012, Gartner also believed that 20% of customer-facing processes will be able to be quickly assembled to meet demands of individual customers using BPM
More information can be found in the report “Predicts 2010: Business Process Management Will Expand Beyond Traditional Boundaries”, available on Gartner’s website.
