IT plays critical role in supporting process management initiatives
ConvergenceAsia staff
13/11/2007

According to a recent survey of more than 300 business and IT users, three-quarters of these respondents state that IT needs to play a ‘critical’ role in supporting process management initiatives. However, a majority of these executives believe that IT has yet to fully satisfy this mandate.

The report, “Business Process Management and Service-Oriented Architecture”, was produced by BPTrends and sponsored by Software AG, a global business infrastructure software company.

Among overall respondents, 25 per cent suggest that other enterprise priorities were undermining these efforts and 17 per cent believe that technology limitations have prevented IT from playing a more critical role.

The study also found increasing recognition for the role that service-oriented architecture (SOA) plays as an enabler of BPM success. Forty per cent of respondents agreed that “BPM is more successful and drives more benefits when deployed in an SOA environment”.

When asked about SOA governance specifically, 53 per cent described it as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to their BPM initiatives with an additional 19 per cent describing it as ‘somewhat important’. Despite this enthusiasm, adoption remains nascent as only 20 per cent report that they are using SOA and BPM together on projects despite the fact that 90 per cent of these respondents indicated that they currently have SOA and/or BPM initiatives underway.

“While some confusion still exists to the ‘real’ meaning of BPM, the market has matured considerably over the past year,” said Paul Harmon, Executive Editor and Founder of BPTrends, and co-author of the study.

“Organisations are adopting BPM as an enterprise discipline and strategy and have taken tentative steps towards embracing SOA as a key enabler. However, work remains to be done as most enterprises have yet to fully grasp the strong and constructive interrelationship between BPM and SOA,” he said.

The survey also found an increase in the number of enterprises that have gone beyond Modelling, Analysis and Design (MAD) products to embrace more broadly-focused business process management software suites (BPMS) to automate and more actively manage their business processes.

Somewhat surprisingly, 39 per cent credit business users themselves with having some responsibility for creating their organisation’s business process systems. This is in addition to the anticipated split between business analysts and enterprise architects/developers with each garnering the support of two-thirds of respondents.

“The old wall that has separated IT from the lines of business continues to crumble,” said Bruce Williams, senior vice president and General Manager for BPM Solutions, Software AG.

“This is clearly an industry in transition, where business methodologies and philosophies are being wedded to a new generation of more adaptive and flexible enterprise tools and infrastructure. Those that take full advantage of IT’s emerging ability to accelerate business change in today’s economy are most likely to be the market leaders of tomorrow,” Williams added.

The survey was conducted in June 2007 with respondents drawn from BPTrends’ global membership base. Roughly half of the 348 respondents currently use BPM software tools.

Additionally, the survey found strong interest in BPM within the financial services, insurance and telecommunications sectors. Interest in BPM in the government and defense sectors also increased sharply over previous surveys.

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