Business process management: a personal view

Business process management is one of the most existing topics in information because it addresses the interplay of people and organizations on the one hand and "process aware software" on the other hand [3, 6]. Particularly interesting are generic tools like workflow management products to support the creation of business process systems. The definition of a business process management system, I prefer is: a generic software system that is driven by explicit process designs to enact and manage operational business processes [5]. The system should be process-aware and generic in the sense that it is possible to modify the processes it supports. The process designs ar often graphical and the focus is on structured processes that need to handle many cases. To show the relevance of business process management systems, it is interesting to put them in a historical perspective. Consider Figure 1, which shows some of the ongoing trends in information systems [1, 5]. This figure shows that today's info...