Business Process Management...

Most changes in technology have only an incremental effect on the way we do business, but once in a while a new technology creates a fundamental change. The Internet was one, bringing the world e-mail and the World Wide Web. Another is Business Process Management (BPM).

The drivers behind BPM are not technological; they are economic. The two dominant economic trends today are globalization and commoditization. Information about products and prices are available instantly and globally. Trade barriers between nations and regions are being dismantled. Niche markets are disappearing. In this changed world, companies have sought alliances, joint ventures, collaboration and outsourcing as new avenues to achieving competitive vitality.

Today, most, if not all, of a firms's staff may be working on joint projects with other businesses. An alliance strategy is an efficient and effective way of acquiring the skills, assets, and processes needed to compete in the new, frictionless world markets. To succeed with such a strategy, however, a business must make itself appealing to potential business partners. Along with the obvious factors in selling yourself—your products, brands, pricing, market access, financial muscle, people, and track record—the increasingly important questions to answer are, "What will it be like to work with you? Can you demonstrate that you will be a dependable partner? Is your way of doing business going to be compatible with and comfortable for my customers? Will we be able to easily integrate and collaborate with your? Will your processes add value to ours, or merely duplicate our own capabilities?"

A company's explicit, not implicit, processes are now a key criterion in the competition to attract global partners. the way to provide convincing answers to the hard questions posed by partners will therefore be to make the company's business processes transparent to an extent commensurate with the company's desire for collaboration. This requires a codified universal description language for processes, a method of stating how processes are enacted that is as exact and unambiguous as a computer programming language. without such a language, companies would have to set up a different, customized shop window for every potential partner it wanted to attract. It would be as though every company spoke only its own language, and each new partnership had to address the translation issue anew. Around the partnering table, the question would be, "How can your company and min collaborate successfully if you cannot communicate with my supply and customer chains, nor I with yours?" In a world where cooperation and virtual companies are the norm and competition pits value chain against value chain, businesses would have a multidimensional problem with answers generated only in one direction.

As the twin processes of globalization and commoditization gather momentum and the old-fashioned go-it-alone corporation is left for historians to puzzle over, the exploitation of a universal process description language will become an essential passport to the future. Processes are no longer regarded as rigid scripts, intended to replace people or force people to function as cogs in the machine. participants of all types—systems, people, and other processes—work together toward shared goals, sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating. Material flow, information flow, business commitments, and computational procedures are equally important to understanding and integrating business processes between partners. Processes are not only the input and output of computer systems. It is not just information that flows, but people, real world objects, results of procedures, even the processes themselves. Processes now model and simulate the real world as readily as they do the internal structure of computing systems.

Collaborating through process management, by building the countless process links in a way that can scale up, will be a source of considerable competitive advantage over the next decades. Companies are becoming part of a practically limitless mesh of links. There are so many nodes in the mesh that the number of potential links between the nodes is simply incalculable. It follows that if companies decide to devise an ad hoc method of communications, or a proprietary protocol, for each link in this vast mesh, then they have signed up for an incalculable amount of work. Projects of practically limitless scope re not the easiest to manage—understatement intended.

To this problem there is only one solution, an agreed-upon-universal language of process, a language that unambiguously describes "what we do and how we do it" and to which all can subscribe. This open standard is precisely the inevitable, universal, language of business process management, the foundation of competitive advantage.

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