A company is a multidimensional system capable of growth, expansion, and self-regulation. It is, therefore, not a thing but a set of interacting forces. Any theory of organization must be capable of reflecting a company's many facets, its dynamism, and its basic orderliness.
-Albert Low, Zen and Creative Management

Convergence and synthesis often produce something radically new. Years ago, moving pictures and radio converged, and the result, television, forever changed the world. The third wave of BPM will no doubt also change the world, but there is nothing new about the purposes that BPM was designed to serve. BPM is not another form of automation, a new killer app or a fashionable new management theory. BPM is a synthesis of process representation and collaboration technologies that removes the obstacles blocking the execution of management intentions. BPM is therefore the conver-gence of management theory-total quality management, Six Sigma, business engi-neering and general systems thinking--with modern technologies--application development, systems integration, computation, service-oriented architecture, workflow, transaction management, XML and Web services.

For the first time in business history, this synthesis makes it possible for com--panies to do what they have wanted to do all along-manage their business processes with great agility. A company lacking vision cannot benefit from BPM, but those who have this vision may now use BPM to execute their strategy with speed and precision. The radical breakthrough lies in using process calculus to define the digital representation of business processes, the basis for new corporate information assets. "Process data" based on an open standard for process description allows managers to leverage both old and new technologies for process management. Established companies with great products or start-ups with innovative business models can take equal advantage. The winners in this "radical evolution" are customers, and the companies that master BPM to serve them.

...

Companies treat processes with care because they constitute vital intellectual property. Processes are the business. Operating a process, keeping it updated, operational and effective, is however complementary to the lifecycle of its improvement-both must be supported simultane-ously and independently. The lifecycle management required might be as simple as keeping track of the versions generated by the design-deploy-redesign loop, or as complex as maintaining project baselines of such long running processes as those governing tightly regulated product design and manufacturing phases in the aerospace industry.

...

In this new process-centered environment, standard business processes delivered in the form of standard "off the shelf" applications that are also used by competitors are appearing less and less attractive. Businesses want to shape their processes themselves, performing continuous and incremental process improvement without technological impediments and bottlenecks. But they still want to exploit low cost, best-of-breed application components where appropriate. Third-wave process management systems combine the best of component application engineering and the best of process engineering to give companies the flexibility they now demand. In light of the overwhelming demand for business process management, the era of stovepipe application development will give way to an era of process manufacturing and assembly.

...

Process management heralds a renaissance in process thinking and process-centered organizational design. And this renaissance is not being driven by technological innovation alone. Far from it. The principal drivers are economic. Business processes, not applications or databases, are the highest-value assets in business today, but the value of those assets lies not only in their execution but an ability to manage them based upon an explicit representation. Tinkering with existing ways of implementing business change, in the way advocated by the reengineering movement of the 1990s, won't be enough. The payoff of this new wave of collaborative reengineering initiatives will be the ability to actually deliver on the decade-old promises of "reengineering."

...

BPM recognizes that change is as fundamental to business as the law of gravity is to physics, and that agility is therefore a fundamental requirement of enterprise architecture. As Ron Brown of Computer
Sciences Corporation explains, "today's CEO is looking to reduce the turning radius of IT, which rivals that of a supertanker in terms of its responsiveness to new business requirements." BPM reorients IT's activities to the trajectory of the business process. IT projects are thus less likely to under perform and to lag business thinking, or to over-engineer solutions to problems that no longer exist by the time the solutions are implemented. From the perspective of the business side, BPM streamlines internal and external business processes, eliminates redundancies and increases automation, providing end-to-end process visibility, control and accountability. Corporations adopting third-wave BPM architecture are already claiming that their newfound agility is a significant new source of competitive advantage. Brown states, "Companies are only just learning that they need not dumb down process design so that the IT department can deliver, or fall back on acquiring standard applications also available to their competitors." Companies can take charge of their processes themselves. Now there is no excuse, either for IT or the business.

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