The Trend from BPM Projects to BPM Programs
In our years of experience delivering BPM solutions, we have witnessed a gradual change in how companies have approached business process management. Four or more years ago (before “BPM” became such a well-known buzzword), companies simply sought solutions to specific process problems.

These types of improvement projects were usually driven by the “owners” of the problems, who were experiencing specific process pains on a daily basis. Their goal was to simply “make the pain go away”, with little vision beyond that. Many times, vendors were able to recognize these opportunities to apply BPM tools and technology. In most cases, a poorlyperformed manual process was replaced with some amount of BPM-based automation to improve both efficiency and accuracy of the process. These early projects could be considered “tactical” in scope (even when they continue to provide significant business value years later).

The awareness of BPM within companies began to increase a few years later (now 2-3 years ago), especially as word spread about the successes from early projects. At the same time, there was a shift in project ownership from the business to IT, as IT sought to standardize upon common BPMS platform technology, either within a line of business or across an entire enterprise.