Firms urged to appoint process analysts

Gartner recommends that firms employ process analysts to deal with BPM boom

The rapid growth of the business process management (BPM) software market dominated the agenda at the Gartner BPM Summit. Delegates were advised to appoint specific process analysts to work on each major business process and create BPM centres of excellence to manage the increasingly complex software required to automate, monitor and model business workflows.

According to new Gartner research, the growing complexity and multinational nature of business processes coupled with the desire to reduce costs by automating many online processes and customer interactions means the global market for BPM software will clear $1bn in 2007 and grow at 24 percent a year through to 2011, creating a market worth $2.6bn.

The analyst predicted that the bulk of this growth will be incorporated within firms’ increased investment in service oriented architectures (SOA) because one of the main drivers for investing in SOA infrastructures is their ability to deliver more flexible applications capable of better supporting flexible business processes. "Because BPM is a major reason for turning to SOA, companies are likely to target some of their SOA software spending to BPMS," predicted Michelle Cantara, research vice-president at Gartner.

However, Gartner warned that firms investing in BPM suites will face major pitfalls, including a lack of management support for projects involving processes that stretch across different departments, a process management skills shortage and poor process governance practices.

It recommended that firms could best tackle these problems by appointing a business process analyst to work on each major business process, ensuring the IT department supports, but does not lead, process management projects, and creating a BPM centre of excellence within the business to develop best practices.

Separately, delegates were also told to expect widespread vendor consolidation in the market as the infrastructure vendors look to tie process management functionality into their middleware and application suites.

"We will see some vendors, such as IBM, SAP and Oracle, making their intentions very clear and aggressively trying to mature their BPMS offerings," predicted Cantara. "Others, such as Microsoft and CA, will lag behind pursuing the BPMS market as a complementary market to their middleware offerings, particularly in the context of SOA initiatives."