Mumbai:
Deriving value from IT over the next 30 years will not
depend on providing systems for new areas of business,
or on finding the next 'killer' application, but on the
ability to build process-driven solutions from existing
IT investments, which fit the needs of users and the strategic
objectives of organisations better.
This
is among the key conclusions of a White Paper to be presented
by Butler Group, Europe's leading IT research and advisory
organisation, at a symposium to be held in London on "Business
Process Management (BPM) - reducing costs through an agile
approach to Integration."
"Organisations
that continue to view integration as an afterthought will
remain mired in the frustrations of under-performing IT
projects and investments", says Mike Thompson, principal
research analyst, Butler Group, who led the preparation
of the white paper for the symposium due to be held on
November 24.
"By
contrast, understanding the potential of BPM, and approaching
integration from a business perspective can provide the
foundations for genuine business transformation,"
he adds.
Automation,
leading to cost reduction, has been the dominant use of
IT for the past 30 years. However, this period has also
left organisations with two huge challenges: firstly,
how to move beyond automation to deliver incremental value
from IT systems. Secondly, how to unite the cluttered
diversity of applications and systems that has resulted
from three decades of tactical, unsystematic, and sometimes
ill considered IT investments.
A
process-led approach to integrating the diversity of business
systems, trading networks, people, and partners that exists
in every organisation is in Butler Group's view, the way
forward. As Thompson observes in the white paper: "A
process-led approach is the most practical alternative
to the large-scale technical integration projects that
have come to grief all too often in the recent past, providing
as it does, a level of abstraction from the underlying
interfaces (both technical and human), and the capability
to relate these integration efforts to the problems that
business managers understand."
Enterprises
investing in BPM solutions still face difficult choices
in a market that has not yet crystallised into a clear
view of its forward direction. BPM capabilities are provided
by a diverse range of vendors offering different types
of solution, ranging from the major application platform
providers, integration specialists, pure play business
process specialists, companies focusing on the intersection
of process and content management, and the process capabilities
that are embedded into enterprise applications.
Autonomy's
moves to acquire Verity, opines Butler Group, has an impact
beyond the obvious market sector of search and content
discovery. Verity had recently repositioned itself to
sit in the BPM space - seeing a great deal of value in
tying together content and BPM, with the emphasis on the
BPM aspect. Autonomy will now leverage this to also move
into the BPM space, the research and advisory leader feels,
which has been the prime driver for the acquisition, as
it allows Autonomy to play against the leading enterprise
content management (ECM) vendors. Clearly, on the back
of the Metastorm acquisition of CommerceQuest this latest
announcement indicates strong movement within the BPM
market that still has some way to go.
Moreover,
as industry moves forward to the new loosely-coupled infrastructure
models, there will be further consolidation within both
BPM and integration - the two will become synonymous within
the next two to three years. Pure-play vendors are under
threat in a market which Butler Group says is set to consolidate
further.
In
its view, a successful strategy will incorporate different
styles of integration and require a range of supporting
tools which vary from one enterprise to the next. As such
vendors in the BPM solutions space
should not be beholden to a particular organisations'
agenda, or method of process management. Instead, they
should provide an open platform that can encompass any
process element, style or interface.
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