A colleague asked me for a three or four sentence description of business process management. I managed to whittle something down to five sentences!
Business process management (BPM) is a “process optimization process” approach and technology. BPM includes discovering, modeling, and executing models of processes and workflows. During model execution, tasks are tracked to completion or escalated, resulting in fast, consistent, error-free task management. BPM software is exceptionally agile, because executable models of processes and workflows are so easily changed and optimized. Increasingly, many applications not traditionally categorized as BPM software, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and interface/integration engines, are embedding BPM-like functionality and behavior.