As per A Strategy Guide for Business
and Technology Leaders — and the Rest of Us by Andy Mulholland, Jon Pyke and Peter Fingar, Business Process Management as a Service (BPMaaS)
creates unique business processes designed for specific purposes to
link together multi-company value delivery systems that in the past weren’t
feasible or economical to join together. BPMaaS is all about the complete
management of business processes, and puts business people in charge of their
processes. In many ways, BPMaaS is what sets enterprise cloud computing apart
from consumer cloud computing. Unique business processes are how companies
differentiate themselves, and are thus paramount to the enterprise use of cloud
computing for competitive advantage. BPMaaS covers the full lifecycle of
business processes, from their conception, design implementation and
optimization. Bringing BPM capabilities to the Cloud enables multiple companies
to share a common BPM system and fully participate in an overall
end-to-end business process.
So what does it mean to
put your processes on the Cloud? On the one hand, there are the obvious
benefits of collaboration across dispersed geographic locations and a more
cohesive value chain enabled by collaboration beyond the firewall. Business
Process Management as a Service (BPMaaS) is also an excellent way to test
project pilots and then have them delivered on demand putting the controls
directly in the hands of business owners for decisions on size of investments,
scalability etc.
On revenues, BPMaaS
radically reduces risk and startup expenses for innovation initiatives letting
companies take more small bets and test out more new ideas. With no upfront
capital expense, new projects can be scaled up instantly if they take off, or
shut down quickly if they fail. This sort of elasticity promotes agility and
provides a launch pad for truly innovative ideas.
Beyond the firewall,
putting processes on the Cloud also allows organizations to collaborate in new
ways with its trading partners, and collaboration is the key to gaining
competitive advantage across the value chain. By establishing shared workspaces
in “Community Clouds” employees from multiple companies can work together as a
“virtual enterprise network” and function as though they were a single company.
They all participate in the same value delivery system, sharing computing,
communication and information resources. This is especially important as no one
company “owns” the overall value chain.
For someone who
consumes Cloud based services and business process management software, it is key to remember that Cloud delivery is
still in its infancy and accounts for less than 10% of all software product and
services delivery models. As per a Gartner report, recognize that BPM PaaS
vendors' view of elasticity generally means that they will enable more services
and more capacity for you, but in many cases, this enablement is not automatic
and not really elastic.
Plan your budget with
the understanding that, even when "elasticity" is automated, it is
usually only automated to increase, rather than decrease. As a result, your
payments may stay the same, even though your consumption decreases.
Examine the multi-tenancy
claims of a BPM PaaS or cloud-enabled BPM platform vendor against Gartner's
CEAP multi-tenancy reference model. The aforementioned limitations in elasticity
suggest that vendor claims of more-advanced "shared everything" multi-tenancy
maybe exaggerated.
In our next post we
will further examine potential pitfalls of BPMaaS and Processes that could be
on the cloud vs. on premise processes.
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