In the latest update to our BPM Suites Wave report, Forrester evaluated 11 leading vendors against 148 product feature, platform, and market presence criteria. The Forrester Wave provided a head-to-head comparison of which BPM suites best support the needs of comprehensive process improvement programs that demand tight collaboration and coordination across business and IT stakeholders. Here's a sneak peak at the findings from our new report: "The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management Suites, Q3 2010."
- Time-to-value and fit-to-purpose are top priorities. Process professionals are searching for ways to trim the fat from bloated BPM initiatives and constantly ask about tools and best practices for making BPM leaner and meaner. Leading vendors – like Pega and Appian - are responding to the need for leaner and more fit-to-purpose BPM suites by providing targeted solution frameworks, embedding agile project management features, and delivering highly customizable end-user work environments.
- Collaboration is the key to BPM program success. Successful BPM programs require collaboration and coordination at all levels and phases. Since our last BPM Suite Wave (i.e., “Human-Centric BPM Suite Wave”), vendors have upped their game in collaboration, with leading vendors delivering sophisticated social and Web 2.0 features that take process collaboration to a whole new level. The most impressive vendors - like Lombardi and Metastorm - have weaved social and collaboration into their DNA – providing sophisticated user profiling, process feeds, process discovery wikis, and even social harvesting capabilities.
- Process repositories are no longer optional. One of BPM’s dirty little secrets is that a single process project can generate dozens of iterations of a single process model. Many process professionals I talk to are frustrated with maintaining numerous versions of a process model across different environments. To resolve this, process professionals are demanding a “single version of truth” for business process models. Some vendors – such as IBM and Software AG - are responding by providing comprehensive process repositories that allow teams to merge and track changes to process models.
- Consolidation hints at a bright future for BPM suites. Market consolidation often creates anxiety and instability within a market. And the BPM suite market has gone through many rounds of consolidation that yielded very little in the way of meaningful benefits for business process professionals. However, the latest round of market consolidation is beginning to bear real fruit for process professionals. Software AG’s acquisition of IDS Scheer will help bridge the divide between strategy and execution for BPM programs. IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi is starting to shape up as a good balancing act between speed and scale. And finally, Progress’ acquisition of Savvion has already resulted in “responsive process management” – real capabilities for real-time predictive process optimization. BPM programs can expect to hit some bumps in the road as BPM market consolidation continues, but overall process professionals can expect to see BPM suites coming together in more intelligent and diverse ways to support real business challenges and new operating models.
Forrester’s BPM suite vendor evaluation reveals a competitive space that is continuing to extends its reach and depth. Most interestingly, our evaluation uncovered impressive support for business-led process transformation. In short – BPM finally delivers on its promise!
Apart from reviewing the Forrester Wave, I also encourage you to attend Forrester's upcoming Business Process & Application Delivery Forum where I will be keynoting with Dave West on "Thriving In A Process-Driven World." Hope to see you there!
Also, if you focus only on the business process, you have only done half the job. The data necessary to operate those processes must be considered as well especially when you begin to automate the processes. Both data and process are important to the organizations' transformation. Most of the BPM suites have some level of data modeling but are usually rudimentary in nature. Standardizing your data and grouping processes that share the same data together is important to understanding the end to end business processes.
I hear you. I've been around the BPM space for the past decade - as a practitioner, as a consultant, and now as an analyst - and I've seen the space evolve considerably over this time. Much of my own perspective comes from seeing BPM suite sales reps sell BPM to the business and the business getting ticked when they realized that they couldn't do this stuff by themselves.
The key here is that the business still can't do it fully by themselves but we're seeing a big shift in the amount of features and functionality targeting the business that really is usable by the business.
Also, we've been doing a lot of research on the connection between BPM and MDM. We refer to this combination as "process data management" and introduced the topic last year in the following report:
"Warning: Don't Assume Your Business Processes Use Master Data" http://bit.ly/bVRB0S.
In fact, as part of the BPM Wave evaluation, we included criteria to assess each vendors support for process data management - explicitly calling out support for business glossaries and data modeling. I think most people will be surprised at the level of sophistication some vendors now offer for combining process modeling and data modeling. But you're right, only a few vendors are at this level yet.
If you have a chance to read the full report I would love to get your thoughts on how we address process data management in the evaluation.
Cheers, Clay Richardson Senior Analyst, Forrester Research