Smart Process Apps — One Year Later

About a year ago, a group of Forrester analysts covering mobility, social, and business process trends started seeing the emergence of a new software category — which we call smart process apps (SPAs). Forrester expects that enterprises will invest $34 billion in them by 2015. How do SPAs help businesses? They position knowledge workers to tackle the untamed processes that most firms struggle with. They float above but interact where needed with core systems. They put people first, are lighter, easier to change, assume mobile, and use big data and analytics to predict events and drive actions. Software vendors have been quick to embrace SPAs. Yet, at least today, enterprises view SPAs as incremental process improvement platforms — and not as a new software category. This report provides a snapshot of current trends in the emergence of smart process apps.