The software and acronym jungle

Understanding the software landscape is an enormous challenge – there is a lot of terminology, some of it overlaps, and some has more specific definitions than others.

“Business Process Management” can mean literally managing business processes – or software to help manage business processes. (You get the impression that some people don’t think there is much difference between these two).

There is a whole range of ‘business process management’ software tools, to help make it easier to make a system to manage your business process.

According to the Wikipedia page on ‘Business Process Management’, a typical BPM suite might include:

• Process engine — a robust platform for modeling and executing process-based applications, including business rules
• Business analytics — enable managers to identify business issues, trends, and opportunities with reports and dashboards and react accordingly
• Content management — provides a system for storing and securing electronic documents, images, and other files
• Collaboration tools — remove intra- and interdepartmental communication barriers through discussion forums, dynamic workspaces, and message boards

This is close to what we are interested in with ‘Software for Domain Experts’ although it also perhaps a bit more sophisticated than most expert users need.

There is also ‘Professional Services Automation’ – defined on Wikipedia as “software designed to assist professionals, such as lawyers, auditors, IT consultants, and other professionals, with project management and resource management for client projects”. So that’s project management software.

The kind of ‘Software for Domain Experts’ we are interested in here is more about simply gathering together information people need and presenting it in the right way.

We believe many expert users are satisfied enough with their corporate file storage systems (for content management) and satisfied with e-mail systems for collaboration (or if not, there are plenty of specialist tools available which will do more)

But what they don’t have is their data in exactly the way they want it – and of course their requirements are always changing.

So that’s why we are maybe looking for a more ‘low code’ version of ‘Business Process Management’.