Spending by Australian organisations on business process management (BPM) software is forecast to reach A$82.9 million in 2016, an increase of 2.5 percent over last year. In New Zealand, organisations are expected to spend NZ$6.9 million on BPM software in 2016, up 5.5 percent over last year.

Worldwide spending on BPM software is on track to grow 4.9 percent to reach $US2.6 billion in 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. Last year showed a slight decline in spending of 0.7 percent, however, US dollar figures were significantly impacted by currency swings in 2015, especially for those vendors with significant revenue from non-North American markets. When assuming constant currency, 2015 revenue showed 6.7 percent growth.

Speaking at the Gartner Business Transformation and Process Management Summit in Sydney this month, Gartner research director Rob Dunie said digital transformation continued to drive interest in BPM platforms.

“Becoming a digital business is not about taking what you are doing now and digitising it – such as turning paper forms into e-forms - it is generating a new business model,” Mr. Dunie said.

“Some of the more advanced BPM platforms allow you to discover entirely new ways of doing things, however, not all organisations are ready for them. The key is to align your organisation’s process maturity to the type of BPM platform that best fits where you are on the journey.”

As a minimum, all BPM platforms include:

• a graphical business process and/or rule modelling capability;
• a process registry/repository to handle the modelling metadata; and
• a process execution engine and a state management engine or rule engine (or both).

Gartner has defined three types of BPM platform and the organisations and use cases they are best suited to.

The three types of BPM platforms - basic BPM platforms, business process management suites (BPMSs), and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMSs) - can help organisations accelerate application development, transform business processes, and digitalize business processes, by providing capabilities that manage different aspects of the business process life cycle.

Basic BPM Platform

Purpose: Design, implementation and execution of processes. Rapid process-centric application authoring. Best for human-centric workflow.

Features: High productivity tool for building process centric applications. No coding required. Graphical modeling, metadata repository, workflow.

Challenges: Process life cycle, process intelligence is limited to BAM/process monitoring,
limited process styles. Does not allow discovery of new processes.

BPM Suite

Purpose: Improve business process and agility throughout the process life cycle

Features: Routine and some non-routine work, continuous intelligence into process performance. Not just human-centric workflow, able to integrate with other systems such as ERP.

Challenges: Operational insights limited to process intelligence, weaker analytics than iBPMS, more complex than basic BPM platforms

iBPMS

Purpose: Compress cycle of observations to action for process reinvention and business transformation

Features: Dynamic and ad hoc types of non-routine work, analyse in-process performance and external data

Challenges: More skills/high complexity, can be expensive, less accessible to non-IT developers.