It must have started with a revolution, a need, a way to recover after a "war" about the fundamental concept of workflow; in the BPM case, the development of modern industrial engineering and process improvement.
The Taylorist version of process management involved measuring and limiting process variation, continuous rather than episodic improvement, and the empowerment of workers to improve their own processes.
It turned out that a Japanese company (The Toyota Production System) had both the business need (recovering from WWII and rebuilding global markets), and the required know-how needed for the implementation of continuous improvement programs.
The next important step was made by Motorola in 1980s, with the creation of ‘Six Sigma’ and the promotion made by General Electric in the 1990s. Six Sigma typically involves a return to focusing on relatively small work processes, and presumes incremental rather than radical improvement.
This was followed in the early 1990s by Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as promoted by Hammer and Champy (1990).
The next major variation on BPM took place in 1990s in the Western Europe companies. The innovation involved new approaches:
● Radical (rather than incremental) redesign and improvement of work;
● Attacking broad, cross-functional business processes;
● Stretch goals of order-of-magnitude improvement;
● Extensive use of information technology, as an enabler of new ways of working.
Another concept that followed Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
ERP systems gained organizational focus and became the next big thing. Those systems were supposed to deliver improved ways for organizations to operate, and were sold by many vendors as the ‘solution to all your problems’. Finally, it was proved that ERP systems weren’t the expected universal remedy, and a more holistic approach was needed.
The evolution to Business Process Management (BPM) hasn’t been an easy road. BPM tries, and succeeds, to learn from the accomplishments and failures of the previous other attempts at achieving process-based organizational efficiency, and offers a more global perspective.
In the evolution of BPM, the focus on improving the company workflow drove to the creation of the EAI concept (Enterprise Application Integration), used to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications. The confusion between workflow products and EAI products generate the Gartner’s BPM taxonomy in 2003, which put out of fashion these concepts (workflow and EAI), and used the term of BPM Suite:
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Integration-focused BPM manages system-to-system flows for process integration across multiple applications. At the time, products in this category were slowly emerging into the human-to-human flow applications - but lagged in user sophistication and user-friendliness.
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Pure-play BPM provides overarching design and connection between application-specific and integration-focused workflows - for example, by triggering a subflow in another system and carrying the result back to the master process. These were the “über-BPM” products, modeling processes across the enterprise, not just subprocesses within the enterprise, and including modeling and analysis tools, business rules engines, and process simulation and optimization.
This division is the basic of modern BPM Suites and the end of this trip. We looked back to the history of BPM and this is only the beginning of the journey.
Be our partners in discovering BPM, because our next stop is the future.
You can find below my sources of inspiration for this article:
http://www.bpm-research.com/research/history-of-bpm-and-workflow-research/
http://www.column2.com/2006/05/a-short-history-of-bpm-part-1/
http://blogs.gartner.com/dave_mccoy/2009/07/06/a-personal-history-of-bpm/
http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid91_gci1299465,00.html