In the United States, De Lage Landen's Americas CFO Peter Handels says the effort to use BPM as the glue that unites systems will be worth it. "When everything is much more integrated, you can rely on the data that's coming from various sources. [In the past] there were inconsistencies in the data, which is annoying when you're making decisions based on that data."

Assessing All The Variables
A greater appreciation for the vast interdependencies among various kinds of data is driving some of the creative deployments of BPM. "Organizations now want to analyze 15 to 20 variances simultaneously in order to run certain applications, whether it's determining labor needs or processing commercial real-estate loans," says John Cingari, OutlookSoft's marketing vice president. Many of today's BPM tools deliver that sophisticated database analysis via OLAP (online analytical processing) capabilities, an architecture for decision-support systems that, while complex, is nicely summarized by another acronym, FASMI, or fast analysis of shared multidimensional data.

At media giant Primedia Inc.'s Enthusiast Media group, which consists of about 120 magazines, the OLAP capabilities of a BPM product (in this case, TM1 from Applix) took the software from finance into the circulation and production departments. "Within publishing you have functional areas with their own significant repositories of data that are ideally suited to being stored in an OLAP cube [technology]," says Jeffrey Polner, senior director of financial analysis. These departments saw that BPM could help them combine circulation data, such as new subscriptions and renewals, with finance data to produce more-accurate projections.

In fact, BPM is emerging as an option for almost any data-intensive area of a company, particularly as businesses move beyond simply gathering that data to actually analyzing it. At Forrester Research, principal analyst Craig Symons knows the challenge users and vendors face: one of his clients has 72 different HR systems. "If data about your employees is in 72 different databases and systems, it's very hard to get any kind of big-picture view about who your best people are, where they are, and what they're doing," says Symons. Today, HR departments are often being asked to focus less on transactions and measurements like cost of hires and more on strategic concerns such as succession planning and workforce optimization.

"The real nirvana is integrated workforce management, where HR is proactive in understanding the goals and objectives of the business and takes the steps to position the company's human capital to maximize opportunities," says Symons. These corporate objectives need to be cascaded down to individual employees, which is where BPM enters: employees can be given specific performance metrics and then measured against them, an approach similar to the balanced scorecards companies have used for years, albeit one with vastly more data points and variables.

That's the same problem, of course, that many software companies that specialize in HR applications aim to solve, as do the ERP vendors whose systems often provide the technological foundation to the enterprise. The specialty firms will argue that they understand many subtle aspects of workforce management that a software company focused (originally) on finance can't grasp, while the ERP vendors argue that they provide much better integration than can be achieved by layering another company's software on top of theirs.

Companies have long grappled with this dilemma: the best-of-breed company versus the one-stop approach of the ERP vendor. BPM offers a third way, an adaptable suite of products that can address a pain point today and then extend into the enterprise on an integrate-as-you-go basis. This can touch off what Jason Averbook, founder of Knowledge Infusion, a consulting firm in Danville, California, calls "religious wars as to who owns BPM," as the department that first brings it into the company tends to want to maintain control over it.

To make the most of BPM, companies will have to avoid such squabbles. They'll also have to evaluate products from a number of market leaders, including (as ranked by Meta Group) Hyperion, PeopleSoft, SAP, Cognos, Oracle, Geac, Longview, SAS Institute, SRC, and Cartesis, along with offerings from newer, Web-based vendors such as OutlookSoft and Host Analytics. And they'll need to decide whether, and to what degree, software that cures a pain point can become a panacea.

Connie Winkler writes about management technology from Seattle.

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