Modern Middle Manager
Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company.
Business Process Management

Wednesday, June 16, 2004  

So BPM is the Big Thing, according to all the e-mail newsletters I got in my inbox today. It was Aligning IT with Business yesterday and it may be Real-Time Enterprises or the Data Center of the Future tomorrow.

What is BPM? It looks like it's supposed to be a mating between reengineering and workflow automation, which had so many syllables it produced a three-word offspring. It also looks expensive; one case study places a $200K software price tag plus 3 full-time employees to maintain it. Now ITE is part of Navistar, a company with a $2.7 billion market cap and about $8 billion in revenue. For them, BPM is cheap and saved them a great deal of moolah. For smaller companies that are, oh, about 1/400 of their size, I suspect that the price of BPM does not scale quite as well. Much like our CRM implementation, which financially did not scale well, I would forsee some BPM software implementation sucking up all of our net income and then some.

Is there a way to do some BPM on the cheap? No, it doesn't look like it. Or maybe I'm wrong. It looks like this topic deserves a little more investigation. Interesting. More on this later.

posted by Henry Jenkins | 6/16/2004 05:29:00 PM

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