Industry Nears Plug-and-Play BPM

An Interesting article in NewsFactor Network today on BPM and on SAP's BPP -Industry Nears Plug-and-Play BPM. There has been a lot of talk about how BPM technology and the combination of process modeling, BPM technology, decent analysis tools etc make it possible for companies to adopt a combination of their own unqiue processes and industry-wide best practices.

What most of these do NOT discuss is the issue of decision-making in these processes. Clearly if I retain manual decision-making I am severly limited in the kinds of process changes I can make and the amount of hands-free or straight through processing I can achieve.

Adding business rules management systems to this kind of environment addresses this problem. By increasing the range of decisions that can be automated and by making it easier to give business users ownership of the rules in their process, the technology helps you implement more flexible, more powerful processes.

There's more on this by selecting the BPM topic or looking at the rules FAQ.