Date: 2001-11-26 23:00:20
Business Process Management, as defined by the Gartner group, is the art of understanding, codifying, automating, and improving the way a company does business (Source : this IBM red book)
The definition of Savvion is a bit simpler : A business process is a structured set of tasks completed in sequence by people, applications or external systems.
Established in August 2000, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.ORG) is a non-profit organization that exists to promote the standardization of common business processes, as a means of furthering e-business and B2B development.
The BPMI model of any two-way e-business process involves three main components, the public interface and two private implementations. The public interface, which is the area of interaction between two business partners, is supported by various protocols such as those associated with BizTalk, ebXML, and RosettaNet. The model further defines two private implementations, which are specific to the individual partners involved and can be described in any executable language. The Initiative has specified such a language, Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), which is an XML-based metalanguage that can be used to model components of business processes in the same way that XML can be used to model components of business data.
An example of BPM produts I worked with is Savvion : Savvion Business Manager was Electded 3rd Product of the year 2001.
