Business Process Management: The Third Wave

OK, here's the story on this one: Some obscure mathematician (Milner) has found a way to model the real world by unifying computer algorithms and communications protocols and this has been picked up by an equally obscure open source community (exolab) which founded a standards group (BPMI.org) and tech company (Intalio) who are building a new class of enterprise system (BPMS) which the book claims will be as important as databases. (you see, I can do research) The book, by CSC Index, the reengineering company, claims some new benefits for this process based approach to building business systems. At this point you might have decided not to buy this book. You'd be wrong. What the book describes is one of the most fascinating Biz-Tech new ideas this reader has ever encountered, period. And from the endorsements in the frontis, it looks like this might be a major trend. My best line from the book .... "As Walt Disney once said, objecting to a proposed sequel to his Three Little Pigs cartoon, "You can't top pigs with pigs" In the world of business, stacking a thousand doghouses one atop the other to build a skyscraper is a great proposition for doghouse vendors, but not for future occupants. Skyscrapers need an architecture of their own -- their own paradigm, not a sequel to the doghouse paradigm" Read and enjoy.

Over two decades ago in his blockbuster book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler wrote that we stood on the edge of a new age of synthesis. We would see a return to large-scale thinking, general theory, and the putting of pieces back together. With fortuitous resonance Howard Smith and Peter Fingar position their thinking as the third wave of business process management (BPM), in doing so helping to realize Toffler's still emerging vision. From both a business and information technology perspective, it is almost as if Toffler was the prophet and third wave BPM the fulfillment of the prophecy. For if the contents of this book are to be believed, third wave BPM is the answer to many desperate pleas from the technical and managerial camps who have suffered through the first two waves associated with Taylorism and reengineering. The authors have done a commendable job of writing for both these camps at once. The result may frustrate some in each group hungry for more detail but the book succeeds in conveying the grand scale and promise of this Third Wave vision. These deeper details can be found in a companion book, Business Process Management: New Directions.Third wave BPM has two goals: hyper-efficiency and unprecedented agility. It aims to meet the needs of companies, including a means not only to conceive of new processes but to implement them, the alignment of processes with strategy, turning organizational change into an engineering discipline, and a "pervasive, resilient, and predictable means for the processing of processes. Unlike previous approaches, BPM can create a single definition of a business process from which alternative views of that process can be crystallized - for managers, business analysts, employees, and programmers. The authors make one of many excellent points when they note that "information processing" should, up to now, have been called "data processing". BPM claims to finally move us from data processing to "process processing".BPM is not just another revolutionary three-letter practice intended to displace all that came before it. On the contrary, one of its multiple strengths is that it synthesizes and extends previous process representation and collaboration technologies and techniques - such as reengineering, EAI, workflow management, service-oriented architecture, XML and Web services, TQM, Six Sigma, and systems thinking - into a unified approach. The entire approach is founded on process calculus, in particular one form of this called Pi-calculus. This author does not pretend to possess sufficient mathematical background to assess this as a foundation in the sense that electrical engineers rely on differential calculus as a foundation. However, the claim could be given added plausibility by noting that the recent field of social network analysis makes use of the mathematics originally developed for quantum physics.Unlike the previous data-centric approaches, BPM's process-centricity equips its adopters to proactively r

I first came across this book as an excerpt in Darwin Magazine. It immediately hit home. Business Process Management - the third wave" is NOT only aimed at experienced business leaders scouting the economic horizon, its for everyone as its themes are universal--in business and in IT. The book is certainly NOT buzzword heavy, in fact the authors go to extreme lengths to make sure they dont talk down to non-technical readers. As they say, managing the processes of a company is about business AND technology (period). Smith and Fingar have made it UNDERSTANDABLE to BUSINESS PEOPLE for the first time (imho) WHY their IT systems often let them down and what they can do about it. Appendices are provided for people who want to geek out. But how Celia can say the book is abrasive beats me. It is so friendly, but at the same time focussed and inspirational. (Peter and Howard - I love the Zen stuff). Yes, they talk about "technology gods" and "cast in concrete" data stovepipes, but that's REALITY guys, that's WHY there is a business-IT divide today and why the third wave BPM could move us all forward, whether we are on the business side of the house or the IT side. I'm an obsessive process architect. These guys have hit the nail on the head. Its true that Smith and Fingar lament the disruptive and "painful reengineering second wave advocated by their former colleague, James Champy." (Champy was CSC, Smith is CSC, for those who dont know). Well, as I said in my comments at Darwin, it looks like the industry is finally moving on and I am simply AMAZED at the clarity of the analysis in the Reengineering Chapter as to how modern BPM systems can now DO what the reengineering guys said they wanted to but gave no solution, other than to employ expensive consultants. Its just plain SILLY for Celia to say that what Smith and Fingar hope to achieve is to "cut IT entirely out of the business change loop". That's not what they say at all. They show how IT can provide BPM capabilities so that business people are EMPOWERED to manage their own affairs. The only thing that Celia says that IS correct is that "it behooves anyone who might be in a position to benefit from BPM -- or to get trampled by the BPM steamroller -- to familiarize themselves with the subject." As I said at Darwin, its refreshing to see processes coming back center stage, but this time with TEETH. The books controversial elements may be missed by some readers, but will be understood by those that have REALLY worked at the intersection of business and IT. Clue, read the Epilog. --- Yours truly, a frustrated (with data) business process analyst just starting to get some understanding of the potential of the third wave.

"Business Process Management - the third wave" is aimed at experienced business leaders scouting the economic horizon. The book is buzzword heavy and assumes a great deal of prior knowledge. Terms like lambda calculus, process calculi, PKI, six sigma and BPML are scattered throughout and not generally explained. The authors make a rather poor attempt at explaining Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), which lies at the heart of BPM (BPML is similar in format to XML and generates flowcharts), but otherwise you're on your own.The overall tone of the book is abrasive. Smith and Fingar rail against "technology gods" and "cast in concrete" data stovepipes. They lament the disruptive and "painful reengineering" second wave advocated by their former colleague, James Champy. They see the main differentiator of BPM as being its ability to connect outwards to partner businesses.What Smith and Fingar hope to achieve with business process engineering is to cut IT entirely out of the business change loop. They envisage being able to completely describe all business processes in BPML diagrams - down to the "Coke" machine's inputs (coins) and outputs (cans of soda). This way, business managers need never deal with IT folk again, and they can outsource entire processes by exposing the relevant sections of BPML to subcontractors.It's truly hard to tell from the book how much of this is blue sky and how much is part of the trend already underway. Either way it behooves anyone who might be in a position to benefit from BPM -- or to get trampled by the BPM steamroller -- to familiarize themselves with the subject.

This is a well-written and useful book about leading edge enterprise business technology. I work in workflow systems development and I think this book provides a thorough yet practical vision of the next generation of business process systems. This book will likely launch a thousand ships with many winners among them. You do not have to be highly technical to get a lot from this book. In fact, it is written for business managers who have some sense of enterprise IT and its impact, both good and bad, in corporations. The authors rightly emphasize some of the current failings in IT and stress that much of the problem is the inflexibility of systems to adapt in the rapidly changing climate of business. Managers need to have control of the overall business processes to adjust quickly, but cannot because business processes are often "baked" into existing IT applications. The authors point to many examples in business history and in current pioneering efforts to show that managing business processes is a determinative factor of success. While this may sound obvious, the solution offered is potentially profound. Business Process Management Systems, or BPMS, are already being sold and deployed in real life environments and yielding benefits. While the authors admit that their full vision will only be realized in the decades to come, there is much that can begin today. Since the book is not highly technical, the authors do not address some of the hairier issues in systems integration (entity ontology for example) but they do outline their key assumptions such as the requirement for legacy integration (one time per system) and the pressing need for business process engineering/analysts. They also assume widespread adoption of a single process definition language. This will of course happen but probably not until after the various players try to sway the market towards their own standards. There are very good appendixes for the technical person and business manager alike. I love the book and recommend it highly. This book is short, insightful and packed with information from a variety of disciplines that are woven together to support the authors' primary assertions about IT for the coming decade(s). What is exotic today could well become a necessity tomorrow.