Trends Report

The Importance Of Matching BPM Tools To The Process

Single Vendor Solutions Are Not Ready Yet To Meet Customers' Full Needs

September 4th, 2009
Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst
Craig Le Clair Vice President, Principal Analyst
Clay Richardson, null
Clay Richardson
Ken Vollmer, null
Ken Vollmer
With contributors:
Matt Czarnecki , Ralph Vitti , Connie Moore

Summary

The world is a complex place, and business process management (BPM) is no exception. Forrester defines BPM as a discipline for continually improving cross-functional business processes. In contrast, BPM suites (BPMS) have a narrower focus as software for modeling, automating, monitoring, and optimizing business processes. Ideally, an enterprise would select a single BPMS to meet all its needs. But BPMS tools are not yet that mature, and — just as importantly — BPMS vendors have biases and blind spots about processes based on their history and philosophy of how work should be automated. Given the profound differences among products and vendors, we segment BPMS tools into three categories: human-, integration-, and document-centric. While some convergence has occurred and more is anticipated, differences between products in the three categories are real. Depending on the processes being automated across the enterprise, you may need more than one type of BPMS.

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