Business Process Management Systems: Strategy and Implementation

Citation

Umapathy, K. (2006), "Business Process Management Systems: Strategy and Implementation", Information Technology & People, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 188-189. https://doi.org/10.1108/09593840610673838

With the advent of Internet‐based technologies, business process designers and information technology (IT) designers are required to work closer to reduce the gap between business requirements and the final deployed IT solutions. James F. Chang, the author of the Business Process Management Systems: Strategy and Implementation, suggests that to address this problem, organizations need to transform to process enterprises. The author describes process enterprise as “the process enterprise is organized around core processes that traverse departmental and divisional lines, and these processes are standardized and measurable throughout the enterprise” (p. 2). Business process management systems (BPMS) facilitates process enterprises by offering IT capability as well as new design and implementation approaches for measurable and standardized processes. Thus, BPMS is able to reduce the gap between business requirements and IT implementations by allowing business process designers and IT designers to communicate better.

In this book, the author provides both business and technical perspectives of BPMS. The author achieves this via providing discussion on business management practices, presenting technical details of business process management (BPM) solutions and providing guidelines for implementing BPM solutions. Thus, this book can be divided into two sections, in which the first section provides discussion on BPM concepts, principles, and practices, while the second section provides reviews and analyses of different technologies that enable BPMS.

The first section focuses on the business perspective of BPMS, which includes chapter one, two, three and ten. This section first provides discussion on process management theories such as total quality management (TQM), six sigma and business process re‐engineering (BPR) that lead to BPM. Second, this section provides an overview of the BPM concepts, BPM principles, and BPM practices. In this subsection, the author shows how BPM is evolving to enable process enterprises. Third, this section provides an overview of BPMS and then illustrates how BPMS fulfills the role as an enabler of process enterprises. Finally, based on lessons gained from former three sub‐sections, a methodology to implement BPM solutions is provided.

The second section focuses on the technical perspective of BPMS, which includes chapters four to nine. BPMS delivers BPM solutions by uniting various integration technologies. Thus, this section reviews and analyzes the following issues related to the integration: database connectivity, messaging interoperability, components‐based integration, modeling business process, executing business process and monitoring business process. The author starts each discussion with a basic introduction of each technology, then presents the complexity associated with the technology and BPMS, and finally converges to the current web services and BPMS standards.

This book covers almost every aspect of the field and provides definitions and summaries of various BPM concepts, business improvement practices, data integration technologies, application integration technologies, workflow technologies, BPMS products and BPMS standards. It also provides detailed technical analyses of the subjects by comparing different varieties within each subject. The combination of detailed summaries and analyses makes this book a good candidate for BPM textbook.

However, due to the lack of separate chapters for introduction and conclusion, it is difficult for readers to understand the structure of the book and the connection between each chapter. For instance, the first three chapters provide the business perspective of BPMS, the next six chapters provide the technical perspective of BPMS different from previous chapters, but the final chapter returns to the business perspective of implementing BPMS that is disconnected from others. Moreover, the author does not indicate the intended audience of the book. The combination of business and technical perspectives seems to address to information systems students. Given that more than half of the book deals with technical details of BPMS, this book would be beneficial for senior and graduate‐level students. Furthermore, the author does not provide extended references that would allow a researcher further explore a specific topic.

Nevertheless, this book provides a comprehensive and integrated view of BPMS, thus it will be a good resource for those who are interested in BPMS and are involved with integrating data, systems and people.