Business Process Management: The Third Wave

This book heralds a breakthrough that redefines competitive advantage for the next fifty years. Don't bridge the business-IT divide: Obliterate it! The book is the first authoritative analysis of how third-wave business process management (BPM) changes everything in business and what it portends. While the vision of process management is not new, existing theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business processes --until now. This book describes a radical, simplifying shift in process thinking and technology that utterly transforms today's information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution. A process-managed enterprise makes agile course corrections, embeds Six Sigma quality and reduces cumulative costs across the value chain. It pursues strategic initiatives with confidence, including mergers, consolidation, alliances, acquisitions, outsourcing and global expansion. Process management is the only way to achieve these objectives with transparency, management control and accountability. The process-managed enterprise grasps control of business processes and communicates with a universal process language that enables partners to execute on shared vision --to understand each other's operations in detail, jointly design processes and manage the entire lifecycle of their business improvement initiatives. Process management is not another form of automation, a new killer-app or a fashionable new management theory. With the third-wave BPM breakthrough and its solid mathematical underpinnings, business processes can now be unhindered by the constraints of existing IT systems. Short on stories and long on insight and practical information, this book will help your business become the company of the future, the real-time enterprise, the fully digitized corporation --the process-managed enterprise. The book also offers continually updated information and a dialog with the authors at its Web site.