Firms will need process integration servers that model and carry out broad business processes.
-Forrester Research, 1999.

The Business Process Management System (BPMS) enables companies to model, deploy and manage mission-critical business processes, that span multiple enterprise applications, corporate departments, and business partners-behind the firewall and over the Internet. The BPMS is a new category of software and opens a new era of IT infrastructure.

The BPMS can be viewed in one of two ways: either as a new platform upon which the next generation of business applications will be constructed, or as a new capability deeply embedded within existing categories of business systems. In each case the analogy is between the existing RDBMS and the new BPMS, between relational data and processes, between the lifecycle management of data and the lifecycle man-agement of process. In either case, by acquiring BPMS now companies gain unprecedented control over the management of their business processes, supplementing their existing systems and accelerating the achievement of business objectives.

Download complete Appendix B

Excerpts from Business Process Management: The Third Wave, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, ISBN 0-929652-33-9 Off-press November 2002, Meghan-Kiffer Press