Making Process the Point
Technology or Philosophy? Depends on Whom You Ask

Chris Preston points to another potent factor. "Governance and compliance is, of course, very pertinent to the conversation. It’s under more scrutiny than ever before. It’s no longer enough to simply have a retention policy and store records someplace. It’s becoming more important that companies have to explain why they made a decision."

Bruce adds a few more pressure factors contributing to the acceptance of BPM as a strategic (versus transactional) initiative: "One is, CIOs are motivated by a retirement factor setting in. They know they can’t justify replacing the retiring people, and they’ve got to bring the headcount down to hit budget targets. Natural attrition will help, but the weight has got to be shared with the business community," he says. "Another motivator is the pure cost pressure; they want to shift the ownership of some of these initiatives away from IT and onto the business side."

Bruce continues: "The slow recognition is that this BPM stuff isn’t just another layer of three-letter acronym crap, and it is not just a new set of programming tools. It’s not just a new set of GUIs, or a new way for the programmers to program logic to drive something. It’s an actual engagement framework that is no longer IT-based. It is now the language of process. There is no longer the need to translate from the language of business people talking to the IT people; it is the lingua franca."