Speaking at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit in Sydney this week, Gartner managing vice president, John Dixon, said the continued growth in the Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) market worldwide was an indicator of BPM adoption among end users and commitment to its use as a strategic tool for improving business performance.
According to Gartner, Australian organisations are expected to spend almost $63 million on BPMS this year, an increase of 9.3 percent over 2011, and compared to worldwide spending on BPMS which is expected to reach US$2.6 billion, up 6.9 percent on 2011.
While attributing the continued growth in the BPMS market worldwide was an indicator of growing adoption among end users, Dixon said this was despite maturity in the market remaining low.
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“In last year's Gartner survey data we saw maturity levels increase, and we continue to see this trend, however, these levels are still relatively low.
“Among organisations that have taken Gartner's ITScore for Business Process Management survey, 15 percent are at Level 1 (the lowest level of maturity) and 75 percent are at Level 2. None had yet made it to Level 5. Much work remains to be done to deliver the game-changing performance improvements that that BPM promises.”
According to Gartner, its surveys indicate that a lack of trained and experienced BPM professionals is negatively impacting the ability of organisations to deliver against their enterprise objectives.
Therefore, Dixon says, the need to find and recruit appropriate resources is a significant challenge for BPM hiring managers. “This resource constraint is being felt by end-user, vendor, and consulting and system integration organisations alike.
“Part of the challenge in finding suitable resources is the broad skill set required to be successful in BPM. Gartner has seen BPM certifications starting to show promise and the number of BPM-certified individuals increase, which may go some way toward mitigating this challenge.
Dixon also told the Sydney summit that business managers were being asked to make faster and better decisions in an ever-changing business context, but could not do so without improved visibility into their operations and environments.
To meet this challenge, Dixon said leading organisations were seeking to make their business operations more intelligent by integrating analytics into their processes and the applications that enabled them. He said Gartner had identified this trend as a new usage scenario for a BPMS, called "intelligent business operations".
“As a result, we have evolved its definition of the BPM market to include a new generation of BPMSs, which we identify as intelligent BPMSs or iBPMS.
“This is a developing space, because "intelligent" processes are still a considerable distance away for many organisations.”
Gartner also reported that technologies offering transformational benefits will drive further growth in BPM, such as social software, mobility and cloud computing and Dixon said that social BPM and social network analysis (SNA) were emerging technologies that were expected to take five to 10 years to reach mainstream adoption, “yet deliver transformational benefits.”
“The move to cloud computing has also affected BPM, with BPM platform as a service and cloud-enabled BPM platforms also set to become mainstream in two to five years.”
At the Sydney summit Gartner presented its new Magic Quadrant for iBPMS for the first time, naming leading global vendors in the new category, with Australian BPMS vendor, XMPro, also identified as one of five ‘Cool Vendors in BPM’ by Gartner this year.
‘Cool Vendors’ is an annual series of Gartner research designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services in a given product or service category.
