Spending on business process management (BPM) projects will rise significantly this year, according to a global survey by Gartner.
The primary research surveyed nearly 600 mid-to-large end user organisations across 14 countries worldwide in the third quarter of 2010, in a bid to understand their adoption patterns, preferences and investment plans related to BPM.
A majority of the respondents were optimistic about budget increases for BPM, with about 54% planning a spending increase of 5% or more and almost 20% planning an increase of more than 10% during 2011.
The survey reveals that Asia/Pacific organisations plan a greater spending increase, which correlates well with increased IT spending generally, but from a lower starting point, with 25% indicating that spending growth was likely to exceed 10%.
Most of the BPM technologies can be deployed to develop flexible business applications, which are often needed to support rapidly growing businesses and improve business outcomes as well as meet the objectives of many organisations’ return-to-growth strategies.
Gartner attributes the BPM spending increase to the demand for software as a service (SaaS) subscriptions compared to tools which can offer a lower-cost starting point, and also because BPM is focused on business outcomes, many business units are funding it more readily than they are IT-specific projects.
The survey findings also indicate that users may need some BPM software capabilities though not a full blown BPMS, and many organisations do not understand the real benefits and aim to achieve full process automation throughout their enterprise; most people improve process by process.
The findings revealed that the most common average initial investment in a BPM project was between $100,000 and $200,000, which is less when compared to many BPM suite (BPMS) implementation projects.
Asia/Pacific respondents were found to have even lower initial project values, with about 35% spending between $50,000 and $100,000, which signify the lower prices usually charged by software vendors in Asia/Pacific, as well as the lower cost of external services.
