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Preface
Defining a Business Process Management Professional
The following is an excerpt from an article written by Brett Champlin, past President
of the Association of Business Process Management Professionals (ABPMP), for BPM
Strategies, October 2006 edition.
Business Process Management Professionals
At several recent BPM conferences, I have asked audiences of several hundred
attendees to give me a show of hands, first for “Who is from IT?” Generally about 30‐
45% of the hands go up; then, “Who is from the Business side?” Another 30‐45%;
then, “Who here is like me, stuck in the middle?” Nearly the entire group raises their
hands, generally emphatically. This is telling. Many of us who work in process
management, process redesign, process performance analysis, process automation,
and the like, are conflicted. Are we business practitioners who have to understand
how to leverage IT to manage by process or are we IT practitioners who have to
understand the business in order to fully utilize the capabilities of new IT solutions?
BPM is both a management discipline and a set of technologies that support
managing by process. A convergence of technologies for workflow, enterprise
application integration (EAI), document and content management, business rules
management, performance management and analytics among other have been
brought to bear with a focus on supporting process based management. A few years
ago BPM software vendors were focused on the execution layer of the technology
stack. Today they are delivering BPM Suites with a full range of features and
functions to support process managers and analysts as well as technology
developers.
Recent research studies confirm that Business Process Management (BPM) is
rapidly evolving as the dominant management paradigm of the 21st Century. An
April 2005 BPMG study found that “…the practice of BPM as a primary means to
manage business has already gained substantial adoption” and “…more than 80% of
the world’s leading organizations are actively engaged in BPM programs, many of
these on a global scale.” An APQC benchmarking study completed in March 2005
found that “BPM is the way best‐practice organizations conduct business.” That
study also examined proven strategies, approaches, tools and techniques (including
business process frameworks and maturity models) employed by world‐class,
process‐focused enterprises and found that while “technology, by itself, does not
constitute Business Process Management, much of the promise of BPM initiatives
will not be realized without powerful, flexible and user‐friendly IT solutions to
support them.”
Business Process Management and Performance Management are merging as more
and more process management groups begin to recognize the organization as a
system of interacting processes whose performance must be balanced, and that
must be the focus of fulfilling strategies. Conversely, more and more of those
engaged in enterprise performance management are realizing that it is the