For years, the pendulum has swung in favor of buying rather than building applications. However, business and technology triggers have shifted executives’ focus from functional efficiency to business process adaptability. As the major suite vendors retool and refactor their applications for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services, a window of opportunity has opened for new process specialists who offer a ‘configure and assemble’ based approach to automating business functionality. The emergence of process specialists marks the end of packaged application suite vendors’ dominance. Distinguishing Processes From Applications
A business process is the set of activities, decisions and information flows performed by people and machines necessary to bring about a desired business result. An application is a logical group of tasks to be automated with the goal of reducing or augmenting human interactions. Most applications automate only a subset of tasks of a business process. For years, automation efforts have ignored the remaining steps of business processes–the human-centric activities. The rigidity of traditional applications inhibits process adaptability.
A packaged application, by design, strives to deliver 100 percent of the necessary functionality. Although packages have been somewhat customizable, users need specialized IT skills and to keep within predefined limits to incorporate new versions easily. Functional improvements primarily come in vendor upgrades rather than users’ innovations.
Emerging Composite Process Solutions
Emerging packaged processes differ from applications primarily by delivering a process model and metadata mapping layer rather than a data model and database instantiation. SOA Web services designed components are completely independent of each other, and components of human interactions and decisions steps are part of the automation in addition to the systems tasks. This differs substantially from packaged applications’ required minimum configuration. This approach enables buyers to configure and assemble the process componetry into an end-user facing solution, orchestrating them with other Web services of their own design. Furthermore, systems automated tasks and human workflows are united making the end-to-end flow of work more manageable.
The biggest value difference of a packaged process is that it is designed to deliver less than 100 percent of the desired functionality. It is a configurable set of components orchestrated into a sequence by users. The value is the extensibility, flexibility, dynamic assembly and integration, not completeness.
Process solutions require a different deployment and execution environment than compiled applications–a business process management suite (BPMS). The absence of this infrastructure inhibits market adoption. A BPMS provides the graphical tooling, a design time metadata repository to support configuration and assembly, and a metadata-driven runtime environment. Demand for flexible processes is driving adoption of BPMS. As this infrastructure becomes prevalent and standardized, the market for packaged processes will accelerate. By 2010, Gartner expects leading process specialists to provide solution sets that interoperate with the then-dominant BPMS. The race has already begun among BPMS vendors to build ecosystems of process specialist partners.
