Business Process Management Suites

There is a market for ‘Business Process Management’ software suites which sounds like a lot like ‘Software for Experts’.

The Wikipedia page for Business Process Management has a section on BPM technology  which says that the following a critical components of a BPM suite:

• 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

The Wikipedia page also says that BPM will address the critical IT issues beneath such as managing customer facing processes, consolidating data, increasing flexiblity of your data infrastructure, integrating with existing systems.

But another point to observe is that Business Process Management is not really low code – often a lot of coding is involved – these are complex systems.

Quoting the Forrester Low Code paper again, it quotes the “systems manager of a UK building society” saying that the company first worked with a fully automated BPM platform and “it took us a long time to get three processes out, and it also took at lot of IT work.”

The building society then tried a low code platform, and found it could develop new process flows, build user interfaces and construct logic much faster.