Intelligent enterprise has an article with the sample title on BPM, below are some of the excerpts.

BPM in a nutshell - BPM is both a management philosophy and a software tool. As a management philosophy, it calls for organizations to document, analyze and measure their business activities not in terms of discrete functions such as marketing, sales, manufacturing and customer service but in terms of end-to-end business processes that cross functional boundaries. In that sense, BPM runs counter to both traditional organizational structure and enterprise application software, both of which focus on integration within each functional unit.

Here are five reasons to invest in BPM:

Simplification. When Windows and LANs invaded the workplace in the early 1990s, the business process reengineering gurus of those days warned, "Don't pave the cowpaths!" Simply automating outmoded business processes made no sense when the nature of office work itself had changed.

Efficiency. The process model describes sequences of business activities - some performed by people, others by automated systems - linked by rules. The software magic of BPM is turning those models into automated implementations that deliver work to those people and systems, enforce the rules and track completion against assigned deadlines.

Compliance and Control. The combination of globalization, mergers and acquisitions and regulatory burdens has created new demands for process consistency and transparency throughout the enterprise. By taking control of business processes and enforcing business rules, BPM ensures compliance not only with policies and regulatory requirements but also with best practices tuned to performance objectives

Agility:The new IT revolution is service-oriented architecture. SOA lets IT assets, both new and existing, be exposed for reuse and interconnection as component services.

Continuous improvement: The ultimate goal of business process management is optimization of business performance. The same metrics and key performance indicators mapped out and simulated in the process model can be aggregated from the process implementation and displayed in real time in BPM performance management dashboards and reports.

Prashanth RaiTag(s):BPM