A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. … A system must be managed. ... The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization.
-W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics

This book has covered a lot of material that we'd like to consolidate into an everyday conversation. To help understand how business process management can help companies, we reflect back from the future with a fictitious interview in the equally fictitious BPM3.0 magazine. In this interview Acme Express suffered, as many companies have, from the business-IT divide. But they did something about it and tell their story to Editor-in-Chief, Paul Hollander.

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BPM 3.0: Hilary, what do you see going forward? How has BPM impacted your financial performance?
Rosen: Innovation and change are our watchwords. We are starting to experiment with automating the adaptation of processes in real time. There are some situations where the ability to implement so-called "smart" processes, that adjust to the needs of our customers, makes sense. An example is ACME's response when a shipment or package goes missing. Because our processes are now explicit they can be read and written by other software, and integrated with sensing systems out there in the real world. We're working with some new vendors that focus in this area of "Process Smarts." Because BPM is based on XML we can extend it to support the new processes we want to develop with partners--as you know we are doing a lot of outsourcing and alliance activities at the current time. We already put time and cost metrics in the process design and have real-time accumulative information as a result, which helps us to stay in control. But this is just the beginning. The results of these calculations can then be associated with switch points within the process based on thresholds or probabilities. We can't tell you exactly what we are doing for competitive reasons, but we can confirm that we intend to protect these innovations in law as far as we can. There are some processes we wish to patent and some for which copy-right protection may be appropriate. We'll be using BPM to provide a clear and unambiguous definition. The combination of our BPMS and the explicit process blueprints, clearly demonstrates our ability to execute these unique processes.

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