Thomas Dwyer said that most of the problems companies have are due to process problems. These include:

BPMInstitute’s State of Business Process Management study, released 8/2/2004, shows that companies are, indeed, seeking to transform themselves into process-centric organizations and consider this transformation to be critical to the company’s future success. Responding enterprises agreed that effectively architecting and managing a process-driven enterprise requires strategic planning of business goals, identification of mission-critical business processes and specification of desired process improvement outcomes

Attendees at the 2004 Business Process Management conferences held in Chicago and San Francisco indicated their company’s desire to transform themselves into process-centric organizations and considered this transformation to be critical to the company’s future success.

In an ideal world, companies would run their businesses as if their application portfolio were a single application. This application would take orders, generate shipping notices, and manage accounts receivable. It would also run manufacturing processes, automatically replenish materials as necessary, and exist as a Web-based front-end for customer interaction. Instead, the real world is populated with silos of data that don’t interact, and gaggles of independent applications that defy efforts to unify processes across the enterprise.