Our annual BPM Pulse survey is in full swing and we now have enough data to begin identifying some trends. This survey looks at plans, results, and satisfaction around business performance management, and its related BI components. By the way, its not too late to share your opinions and receive the full survey results (and perhaps win an iPod). The survey will remain open until the end of January. Now on to the early findings. Budgeting and Operational Analytics lead the pack, as they did in last year's survey, when it comes to the areas of BPM most companies are focused on. This was not unexpected. The next few findings however were surprising, and bode well for the industry.
Overall vendor satisfaction, which was somewhat disappointing last year, has improved significantly. In addition, when you delve into the details the vendor attribute with the highest score turns out to be 'price/value'. I find that to be truly amazing. In my experience no matter how happy people are with their software they usually complain that it's overpriced. Has the functionality finally caught up with the price, or are BPM vendors discounting significantly due to market pressures? The lowest rated area, as I would expect, is product documentation. Whether online or hardcopy users still struggle to find the answers they need. On the service provider side, according to the survey, the use of consulting is expanding from just basic implementation help to assistance with project/deployment management and requirements definition. There are many other interesting findings we'll share when the results are final. As we continue to receive more survey responses the results presented here may change. It's more likely however that while the percentages will change somewhat, the fundamental trends we now see will remain.
Posted January 9, 2006 8:23 AM
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I think the whole BPMS space is undergoing a massive transition. Having over 100++ vendors claim that they have "BPM" capability is not helping. Most of them are essentially rebranding Workflow capability as BPM. In my humble opinion, a true BPMS must support these 5 functions.
1) Multi user collaborative process design
2) Process Simulation
3) Robust human workflow & web services support
4) Strong metrics gathering and reporting
5) Scalable server and other infrastructure
In the interest of full disclosure, I am the lead developer on the Selcian BPMS product (at www.selcian.com) and I can tell from personal knowledge that its a challenging but satisfying experience to create something which meets all the above and is very usable by business analysts. A lot o vendors are getting caught in the "standards" debate and ignoring customer needs.
The key for BPM is to make business agile and for that the tool must be highly usable and configurable by business users.
Last but not the least, integration capabilities are a must, but at the same time heavy reliance of third party products is a recipe for long term handicap.
I do have a couple of friends who work for new vendors in this space that are taking the "short cut" route of pigggy backing on existing products of larger vendors (i.e. IBM, Microsoft), but in my humble opinion, thats a short term strategy similar to a pilot fish feeding off of a large whale. Their best hope is to angling for getting acquired. But if for any reason, the "whale" changes direction, then its trouble for them and their customers.
Overall, BPMS is very much a happening area so stay tuned....