What is a "Process-Based Application"?

Processes are your business

Virtually every business mission statement, goal, or differentiator ultimately gets expressed in a business process. A business links those processes together to create its e-commerce platforms, reservation systems, human resource management, cloud computing, and other customer-facing and internal platforms.

You could say every business is the sum of its processes, because processes spell out how a business conducts its activities. It follows that a business must design its processes thoughtfully, to reflect its unique requirements and value propositions.

Specialized applications that implement those processes support the organization in maintaining competitive advantage. But typically, two problems prevent companies from developing those strategic applications successfully: lack of coordination between business experts and IT, and poor decisions about how to build the applications.

What is a BPM application platform?

A Business Process Management (BPM) application platform provides a single integrated environment for the development and deployment of business processes through its enabling technologies:

• BPM notation (BPMN) modeling tools
• Process (workflow) engine
• Business rules engine
• Integration capabilities to connect applications with third party services (bidirectional)
• User interface designer

Business and IT must work together

Too often, IT develops applications with little involvement from the business people who have a deeper understanding of the goals that the process is supposed to support. This lack of communication often results in poor-quality applications and inefficient development.

Developing on a BPM application platform can solve this problem, because some of the most sophisticated BPM application platforms are remarkably intuitive to use. Such BPM solutions “speak the language of business” with businessoriented views of related tasks and data. This enables business experts to participate with IT in defining and creating processes that support business objectives.

This can save tremendous amounts of frustration, time, and money compared to traditional approaches, which typically require one or more cycles of rework because of poor communication between business and IT experts.

Discover in this ebook how process-based application can be a competitive advantage for your business.