What do BPM users want?
February 6th, 2009 by Alex Neihaus
You have to admit that the economic news these days has become truly frightening. In the US, joblessness has reached levels not seen in decades. Across the planet, governments are being forced to intervene in their economies in unprecedented ways.
But this isn’t a blog about economics. Instead, it’s a blog about a technology — business process management (BPM) — that allows enterprises to respond to these challenging times.
Jim Sinur of Gartner wrote this week about how customers’ perceptions of what BPM can accomplish for them today have changed from what they were just before the current economic upheaval. And to nobody’s surprise, the economic climate has pushed aside technical benefits in favor of bottom-line considerations like reducing costs and improving quality.
We have just one suggestion to add to the mix: think about saving big bucks in the BPM system itself. Consider the costs of having to integrate multiple “stack” products to achieve a BPM application — having to build the car from a kit before you can drive it. Consider the costs of BPMN-only systems which cannot directly execute the application without being either proprietary or adding megabytes of hand-coded Java. Consider, finally, the costs of delay because your company simply cannot afford millions for a BPM system.
We like to think that ActiveVOS is the ideal product for these times: open, comprehensive, all-in-one, easy-to-learn and -deploy. But most of all, affordable. Maybe the silver lining in all this economic turmoil is that customers’ costly-is-better price prejudice with respect to BPM will dissolve on the alter of necessity and allow them to discover BPM that’s both better and less costly. That’s ActiveVOS. And it’s one reason we’ve recently displaced IBM at a giant European insurer and why we continue to gain market traction. Do yourself a favor: see if your BPM vendor posts its prices. We do, right here. We want you to know going in what a great system costs.
When your company is looking to BPM applications to save more pennies, it only makes sense that you would want to squeeze costs out of the BPM system itself. And it’s pretty clear that what Jim’s clients were thinking, too.
Tags: BPM, BPMN, BPMN, business process management
