Simon Dale, VP and CTO, SAP Asia Pacific, explains: "BPM is today implemented using engines that interpret a model of a business process as if it were code. The benefit of BPM is that you don't have to be a programmer, or even an IT specialist, to develop and change business processes. The modeling tools are at a sufficiently high level of abstraction and intuitive use that a real business person can quickly understand and manipulate the business process model into his or her desired way of doing things."

Why can't users write all their applications from scratch? "They could, but it would be pointless, since well-proven applications such as ERP are available, which can be easily customized," said Dale.

The future of software

Jeff Kristick of Tibco also believes that the future of software is split between packages and software written with BPM. For example, the promise of ERP applications was to standardize packages across organizations, but for large organizations especially, only a certain proportion of the enterprise's core business processes are included. Management wants to be able to create all the processes it needs.

Modeling is a key part of creating a BPM product, said Kristick. "We model the business process, execute it, then capture all the data and see the time taken for each state. BPM enables you to model a process, create an application and then monitor it against key performance indicators. In our Staffware Process Suite, visibility into the process gives us better control. If I can see there is a bottleneck, I can change the process definition, and then automate the change."