Business Process Management

Business Process Management BPM is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information. The term operational business processes refers to repetitive business processes performed by organizations in the context of their daytoday operations, as opposed to strategic decision making processes which are performed by the toplevel management of an organization. BPM differs from business process reengineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at oneoff revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolutionThe traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process. However, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a federation of software and human intervention. Due to the complexity of the federated approach, documenting a process is difficult. This makes changing or improving the process difficult. As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process as developed in the process design activity to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan or, when a step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition is much more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.