Web Services: A Work in Process

That's a small but useful example of how Web services standards allow small modules of functionality to be combined into larger applications. If the company decided, after the system was built, that it wanted to capture whether the trip in question satisfied some training requirement on the part of the employee, the process map could be redrawn to incorporate the passing of the relevant data to the relevant human resources system. Once the rules were changed, the BPM software would connect the necessary systems, and Web services would facilitate the passing of data into the additional program(s).

The potential for combining Web services and BPM is not lost on software makers. In fact, it may be the software makers, including but not limited to those that offer BPM products, that are most excited by Web services, since it allows them to offer customers products that pose little or no integration challenge. Yet, despite all the hype surrounding Web services, says James Maniscalco, CEO at Nobilis, "if our salesmen go into an account touting Web services, we've already lost the sale." Instead, by incorporating Web services into his BPM software, Maniscalco can offer customers functionality they couldn't get any other way, and they almost certainly don't care how the software actually works.

Nobilis not only tries to hide the complexity of the underlying software from users by offering a drag-and-drop interface, but it recently launched a new product so that a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet becomes the primary front end. Given that it competes with much larger players in the BPM space, from IBM and Hewlett-Packard to CompuWare, FileNet, Fuego, Metastorm, SeeBeyond, Sybase, Tibco, and Vitria, innovation is clearly essential. (See how some of these companies compare with the CFO PeerMetrix interactive scorecards.)

"We're on the verge of a new wave of application development," says Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner. "Instead of shipping a long-term project off to Bangalore, you can tackle something internally in a few days." Analysts, in fact, see 2002 as the year in which most companies pilot Web services, with 2003 seeing serious implementation. The embrace of a combined BPM/Web services solution is harder to predict, in part because companies need to decide whether to adopt a companywide approach to BPM or to use different approaches for different business processes. But in either case, these technologies are being hailed for their value in making companies more responsive to change by developing and integrating software systems more quickly. "Given that most IT projects last longer than the careers of the people who tackle them," says Andrews, "this is good news."

Scott Leibs is a senior editor at CFO.

BPM Breakdown

Business process management has been dubbed the next "killer app" by Delphi Group, but to date the market hasn't agreed. Only 12 percent of the companies surveyed by Delphi are using BPM, although approximately two-thirds of those currently testing it do plan some sort of deployment within a year. BPM separates the business rules (or process logic) from the applications that run them, creating a clear boundary between what a company does (the process) and how it does it (the supporting applications). The Hurwitz Group Inc. identifies four main components to BPM:

1. Modeling. A map or other graphic representation of the process assets, multiple steps, sub- and parallel processes, fulfillment paths, and rules that shape event processing, exception handling, and error handling.
2. Integrating. Connecting process assets and automating transactions and data flow
   among applications and people.
3. Monitoring. Providing an "administrative console" that displays status and metrics.
4. Optimizing. Analysis of inefficiencies combined with the means to address them.

Aberdeen Group cautions that because a "business process" can be hard to define, companies must be wary of software firms that bill themselves as BPM providers; many have extended a specialized core competency into what they bill as a more broadly focused BPM offering, requiring prospective customers to shop very carefully. —S.L.

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