I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections.
-Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

Some business fundamentals really are fundamental-they never go out of style. Today's businesses do what they always have done: They buy, make and sell goods and services. Even after Fredrick Taylor advised robotizing the workforce in the 1920s, even after the reengineering gurus Hammer and Champy advised obliterating work and downsizing in the 1990s, the fundamental mission of business did not change, and will remain the same long after the management guru du jour has come and gone. All management theories center on how to improve the way companies work-how to do what they do "cheaper, better, faster." At the core of most so-called management breakthroughs is an age-old and often misunderstood concept: the business process.

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In his landmark book, Process Innovation, Thomas Davenport defines a process as follows:

Simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis upon how work is done within an enterprise, in contrast to a product focus's emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs: a structure for action.

These definitions, although helpful, hardly begin to explain the true nature of collaborative and transactional business processes. At the very least the word coordination is missing. A business process is the complete and dynamically coordinated set of collaborative and transactional activities that deliver value to customers. Processes are
characteristically:

• Large and complex, involving the end-to-end flow of materials,
  information and business commitments.
• Dynamic, responding to demands from customers and to changing market conditions.
• Widely distributed and customized across boundaries within and between businesses, often spanning multiple applications on disparate technology platforms.
• Long-running--a single instance of a process such as "order to cash" or "develop product" may run for months or even years.
• Automated--at least in part. Routine or mundane activities are
  performed by computers wherever possible, for the sake of speed and reliability.
• Both "business" and "technical" in nature--IT processes are a subset of business processes and provide support to larger processes involving both people and machines. End-to-end business processes depend on distributed computing systems that are both transactional and collaborative. Process models may therefore comprise network models, object models, control flows, message flows, business rules, metrics, exceptions, transformations and assignments.
• Dependent on and supportive of the intelligence and judgment of humans. People perform tasks that are too unstructured to delegate to a computer or that require personal interaction with customers. People also make sense of the rich information flowing though the value chain, solving problems before they irritate customers and devising strategies to take advantage of new market opportunities.
• Difficult to make visible. In many companies business processes have been neither conscious nor explicit. They are undocumented, embedded, ingrained and implicit within the communal history of the organization, or if they are documented, the documentation or definition is maintained independently of the systems that support them.
  
• The three most fundamental characteristics of a business process have little to do with the obvious inputs and outputs of individual work tasks. They are coordination, coordination and coordination. If activities are collections of individual tasks, it is the synchronization and coordination of those activities and tasks that make them business processes. Coordination is a complex subject--a Center for Coordination Science has even been established at the prestigious Sloan School of Management at MIT to study the subject.

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Despite the complexity and messiness of the real world of business processes, business process management is no longer optional: It's a mission-critical need. Businesses are under great pressure to reengineer change management and get past the platitudes and low-impact linear input-output processes of the reengineering movement, which was long on talk and short on results. Companies that "get it" recognize that they must evolve out of their current "as-is" state into what process engineers call the "to-be" state, becoming a process-managed enterprise. Technology has not been able to provide them with means of doing so--until now.

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