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By Bob Violino
Organizations are always looking for ways to improve their processes, whether it's streamlining practices to save time and reduce costs or making quality improvements to reduce errors. One increasingly popular technology that can help deliver process enhancements is business process modeling software.
Business process modeling, which is a component of business process management (BPM), enables companies to design, execute and monitor business processes.
Some of the key benefits of business process modeling tools are that they provide simulation capabilities that predict where bottlenecks will occur in a process before it is deployed. The software also allows companies to better allocate resources such as people, based on predicted events and the timing of these events.
Business process modeling software—which is offered by vendors such as IDS Scheer, Mega International, Telelogic and Casewise—can also help decrease costs and deployment risks by giving organizations a clearer view of the potential outcomes of business process changes. And, the tools are designed to be easy for business analysts to use.
Their usefulness is one of the reason market analysts are predicting big things for business process modeling software.
Research firm Gartner in October declared business process modeling one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008. And Forrester Research sees worldwide revenue for business process modeling/enterprise architecture software —a $320 million market in 2006 —growing between 15% and 25% over the next two years.
One of the key drivers of this market growth, says Henry Peyret, senior analyst at Forrester Research, is the current enterprise focus on improving business processes. Companies are analyzing their processes to make productivity improvements, comply with government regulations, deliver quality improvements, or for a mix of these reasons.
The growth in demand for business process modeling is also coming from the emergence of SOA as a key strategic initiative, says Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. SOA—or service oriented architecture, a method of creating applications that can use the functions, or services, in other applications —requires that organizations understand their processes in order to meet enterprise needs, Genovese says. Business process modeling provides the discipline and the tools to enable a services architecture, she says.
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