Business Process Management (BPM)

Over the last couple of years, BPM tools have really started to evolve. From a technical perspective, I think that the underlying integrations of databases and applications is pretty cool, but the overall business picture is interesting as well. BPM really just boils down to the continuous evolution of business processes. BPM tools combine management methods with information technology. They monitor business activity and facilitate analysis to provide information so managers can tune or change processes intelligently. Once a BPM system is in place, key indicators for processes are monitored to discover trends and perform optimizations. Basically, BPM is a way to close the loop on business processes.

BPM tools usually combine the same 5 elements:

• A presentation layer,
  
• process execution engine,
  
• integration technologies,
  
• business rules engines, and
  
• business activity monitoring.
  

For now, I'm vendor agnostic. I've few interesting solutions so far, and a couple of them are custom. I'm looking forward to seeing a some slick new tools at some of my friend's companies over the next few months, so maybe I'll learn about something that really does a good job.