The benefits claimed by business-process management (BPM) sound almost too good to be true. Proponents crow about lower application development costs, shorter time to market, improved compliance enforcement, and new points of leverage for optimizing business performance. BPM software can't improve anything by itself, of course -- but it can be a powerful weapon when combined with business-oriented documentation and analysis. Within its own controlled, high-level app dev environment, BPM wraps I.T. solution development within business-driven modeling and performance measurement.
At the least, BPM provides an effective new medium through which the business side can communicate its requirements to I.T. At best, it can distill functionality from existing applications and free business logic from the bonds of existing infrastructure to enable unprecedented agility.
