Executive Overview The State of Business Process Management - 2010 A BPTrends BPM Market Survey Report
Current Interest in Business Process Management We asked respondents to describe their organization’s current interest in business process initiatives. Fiftytwo percent (52%) said their organizations had either a strategic commitment to becoming process-centric, or were engaged in one or more major business process change projects. An additional 45% said they were exploring opportunities or had made an initial commitment.
Figure 1. Current Interest in BPM Interest in process work is a perennial concern of business and government. There was great enthusiasm for Six Sigma in the Eighties. Business Process ReEngineering was very popular in the mid-Nineties. The current enthusiasm for business process management originated around 2003. For some, BPM is simply the latest term for analyzing and redesigning business processes. For others, today’s BPM places a special emphasis on enterprise-wide process management efforts that provide the organization with a better way to coordinate and prioritize process efforts. For still others, today’s interest in BPM involves the use of new software tools or platforms that support the day-to-day execution of processes and provides managers with data about the performance of their business processes. Whatever one means by BPM, it is clear that BPM is alive and well and has survived the current economic downturn.
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Reasons for Interest in BPM When asked respondents why their organizations were interested in BPM, over half cited the need to save money. The second largest group said that their organizations were committed to BPM because they needed to improve management coordination or organizational responsiveness. [1] 60%
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Figure 2. Business Drivers of BPM It’s often been said that process work is indifferent to the economy. In good times, organizations rely on process change initiatives to expand, integrate acquisitions, and create new processes to enter new areas of business. In tough times, business process initiatives are undertaken to consolidate, to save money and to increase productivity. Clearly, businesses are currently in “tough times” mode and using their process improvement capabilities to cut costs and to look for opportunities to improve productivity.
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How Much Companies Spent on BPM in 2009 In spite of economic difficulties in 2009, most of our respondents reported that their companies continued to work on process improvement projects. As you can see in Figure 4, 53% of the respondents reported that their companies spent under $500,000 on process work. The overall allocation of BPM spending has remained steady from 2005 to the present, although companies have been gradually increasing the total dollars spent. That trend continued 2009.
Figure 3 How much are companies spending on BPM?
The Overall Focus of Organizations Respondents were asked to identify the types of initiatives that were most important to their organizations. The two initiatives that were of most interest were 1) improving specific departmental level processes and 2) Incrementally improving existing processes. This fits well with the current economic climate, when most organizations are working to save money or to do more with less. 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1
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Figure 4. Overall Focus of Organizations Copyright (c) 2010 Business Process Trends.
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How Has the Economic Downturn Affected BPM Activity Most respondents said that their organizations had not reduced their BPM efforts in 2009. They either didn’t cut their BPM expenditures at all (34%), or they cut back but have continued their BPM efforts (29%). Even respondents who said their organizations had cut back initially indicated that they are now beginning to become active or accelerate again. (19%). We didn't cut back our BPM spending 34% Other 8%
We cut back, but are now beginning to accelerate again 7%
We cut back sharply, as A result of the economic downturn, and there's no end in sight 10%
We cut back, but have continued BPM efforts 29%
We cut back sharply, but now are beginning to become active again 12%
Figure 5. Response to the Worldwide Financial Downturn
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BPM Products or Services Being Used Those who responded to the survey were asked to identify the products or services their organizations were using as they undertook process projects and programs. As in all such surveys, the most widely used process tool was a simple graphics tool, like Visio or Powerpoint, which most organizations acquire as part of their office suites. Simple tools like this, of course, are not coupled with repositories or databases and thus do not allow organizations to accumulate information about processes. An important sign that an organization is becoming more serious about process work is that they begin using one of the more sophisticated process modeling tools and rely on the associated repository to document and store the knowledge the organization gains about its processes. As in past years, the next most popular tool is a sophisticated process modeling tool. This is where most organizations begin a serious process journey and most spend a few years modeling and gaining more insight into their departmental processes before they begin to consider more complex initiatives. BPM suites or platforms, despite the attention focused on them by vendors and IT organizations, are still relatively new and only beginning to gain traction in most organizations. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence to suggest that BPMS products have reached a critical level and their use will increase rapidly in the years ahead. 70%
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Figure 6. BPM Products and Services Currently Being Used
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Specific Types of BPM Software Tools Being Used When asked about the types of BPM Software tools being used, respondents replied as shown in Figure 7.
BPMS Suite or execution environment (Workflow, EAI) 16% Repository 6%
Simulation tool 3% BAM/Real-Time Process Monitoring tool 2% Performance Metrics tool/system 7%
Business Rules tool 2%
Other 5% Process Modeling tool (Casewise, IBM Modeler, ProVision) 27%
Organizational Modeling environment 4%
Graphics tool (Visio, PowerPoint) 28%
Figure 7. BPM Software Tools Used
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Process Standards that Were Important to Respondent’s Organizations The most important standard to organizations throughout the world was the Object Management Group’s Business Process Management Notation (BPMN), a standard that defines the symbols and syntax to be used in constructing process flow diagrams. BPMN provides a simple subset of its notation that can be used by business people to describe how work occurs at their organizations. Once they have modeled and then redesigned their business processes, IT developers can use an extended set of the same notation to describe how to automate some or all of the process. Having a common notation for business and IT analysts – in effect a common language in which business managers and IT developers can discuss processes – is considered a major advance in process work. Clearly, organizations are willing to invest in a standard that promises to make it easier for their business and IT developers to work together.
Figure 8. Process Standards
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Interest in SOA and Cloud Computing When companies began to experiment with business process software packages in 2003, the vendors were not talking much about Service Oriented Architecture or about Cloud Computing – infrastructure or network techniques that can be used to allow BPM products to access and link to other software modules that can be used in process automation. Since then, both SOA and Cloud Computing have been extensively promoted as key BPM technologies. We asked our respondents how important either SOA or Cloud Computing were to their current BPM efforts. Thirty-two percent (32%) said that they were doing process work and were not too concerned about either SOA or Cloud Computing. Only 15% said they were using SOA in conjunction with current BPM projects and only 4% indicated they were using Cloud Computing in their BPM efforts. This does not mean that these technologies may not become more important in the future, but they have not become key elements of most BPM efforts to date.
Figure 9. Interest in SOA and Cloud Computing
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Biggest Challenges to Selling BPM to Management Respondents said that the biggest problem they had in persuading senior executives to pay more attention to BPM was the confusion resulting from multiple groups within the organization offering alternative process solutions. Many large organizations today have Lean and Six Sigma initiatives, and most have process redesign efforts managed by business leaders, and process change and automation efforts managed by IT. In addition, many have a balanced scorecard or some other performance management initiative and may have major ERP or other automation commitments. The confusion resulting from these various and different approaches to process improvement is one of the main reasons organization executives have been so eager to adopt process management programs that emphasize central coordination and prioritization of their process efforts.
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Figure10. Biggest Challenges to Acceptance of BPM Efforts
Company Plans for 2010 The BPTrends survey also asked respondents how much their companies were planning to spend on BPM in 2010. As you can see in Figure 11, the largest number said that they would be spending money on sending Copyright (c) 2010 Business Process Trends.
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people to BPM conferences. This, of course, suggests that lots of companies are still eager to learn more about BPM. which in turn suggests they are in the early stages of BPM.. Aside from the large interest in conferences, other spending plans include acquiring process modeling tools and BPM suites or platforms that include not only process modeling, but support for managing process as they are actually executed. There was also interest in acquiring process monitoring or Business Intelligence tools that can feed process information to executives and a continuing interest in programs that train employees in the basic process analysis and design skills. 40%
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Figure 11. BPM Products Being Considered for the Coming Year [1] In this case, respondents were able to choose more than one response, so the numbers do not total 100%. The information and the figures included in this summary are hereby released to the press for use in the preparation of articles or news items relating to the current state of the business process market. All such use must clearly cite the source of the information and figures as The BPTrends Survey Report – The State of BPM -2010 and must state that the full survey report is available at no charge at www.bptrends.com ##### For more information on the BPTrends Survey Report, The State of Business Process Management - 2010, please contact: Paul Harmon, Executive Editor, BPTrends at
[email protected] or by phone: +1 415 346 1425
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