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Business process management

So, some forms of digital business initiative related to internal processes such as the introduc‑

tion of a human resources management system are simply about improving efficiency – they 

involve incremental change. The practice of improving the efficiency of business processes 

with the assistance of information systems is an important activity in many organisations as 

is shown by Case study 10.1. It can be seen that the label in vogue at the time of writing is 

‘

business process management

’ 

(BPM)

. This encompasses different scales of improving 

business process that are introduced above.

The BPM concept has been defined by Gartner (2003) as follows:

BPM is a methodology, as well a collection of tools that enables enterprises to specify 

step‑by‑step business processes. Proper analysis and design of BPM flows require a 

strong understanding of the atomic business steps that must be performed to complete 

a business process. As BPM executes a business process, these atomic steps will often 

correspond to  well‑  known business activities, such as checking credit ratings, updating 

customer accounts and checking inventory status. In effect, the BPM process flow is often 

just a sequence of  well‑  known services, executed in a coordinated fashion.

Classic document workflow, which was BPM’s predecessor, focused on humans per‑

forming the services. Fueled by the power of application integration, BPM focuses on 

human and automated agents doing the work to deliver the services.