The Scope and Evolution of Business Process Management

Business Process Management or BPM, broadly speaking, is part of a tradition that is now several decades old that aims at improving the way business people think about and manage their businesses. Its particular manifestations, whether they are termed “Work Simplification,” “Six Sigma,” “Business Process Reengineering,” or “Business Process Management,” may come and go, but the underlying impulse, to shift the way managers and employees think about the organization of business, will continue to grow and prosper. This chapter will provide a very broad survey of the business process movement. Anyone who tries to promote business process change in an actual organization will soon realize that there are many different business process traditions and that individuals from the different traditions propose different approaches to business process change. If we are to move beyond a narrow focus on one tradition or technology, we need a comprehensive understanding of where we have been and where we are today, and we need a vision of how we might move forward. We will begin with a brief overview of the past and of the three business process traditions that have created the context for today’s interest in BPM. Then we will turn to a brief survey of some of the major concerns that process practitioners are focused on today and that will probably impact most corporate BPM efforts in the near future.