Experiments never fail.
-Dale Dauten, The Max Strategy

To business people, it seems that technology is always getting more complex. Technical people feel the same way. Over the last five years, delivering business applications has become much more complex, with layer upon layer of new infrastructure requirements and new features. While this has been good for IT industry players that sell new products for new layers, it is not necessarily so good for companies that use them as business tools. When complexity mounts and eventually becomes unmanageable, it's time for action. 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.

The spreadsheet is a simple yet eloquent example of a useful para-digm shift. The convenience and low cost of the breakthrough was so striking that it led to the PC revolution in business. The spreadsheet could not have been successful had it not been for the fact that personal computers--a standards-based commodity--were spreading like wild-fire elsewhere in society. To the business, the PC loaded with a spread-sheet meant a radical simplification of routine calculations, transferring to the everyday business person a function that had once required special programming skills.

A similar simplification and transfer of functions is needed by those pursuing business process development and optimization, for as the management prophets foretell, the next phase of corporate development will require systematic control of the value chain, rather than narrow-gauge process fixes. Michael Hammer has admitted that managing such wholesale change is mind-numbingly complex. In fact, it is no longer possible without computer assistance. The technology-planning horizon for Global 5000 companies is now a synthesis of software engineering and process engineering. With the widespread adoption of application servers, component-based development and Web services, the field is ripe for the wildfire spread of process management.

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BPM does much more than facilitate process design. It provides a direct path from vision to execution. As we stated earlier in this book, it's not so much a matter of "rapid application development" as "remove application development" from the business cycle. Show the BPM capability to any executive at any level and they will understand inside five minutes how to break through the IT logjam. Some may still want to prevent managers from defining business processes themselves, saying it is too complex a job and should be left to specialists. That may be true right now, but it won't be by the week after next.

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