Business Process Management

Abstract

As the business competition gets increasingly intensified, a competitive business becomes increasingly dependent upon effective and reliable computing services empowered by integrated IT systems. Effective IT systems in an organization are remarkably delineated with the same characteristics: the right data and information can be delivered to the right user at the right place on time; the underlying IT supports can be easily adapted to the ever-changing business setting so that the first characteristic can be consistently maintained; business intelligence can be incrementally developed to facilitate business operations with the support of effective decision-making at a variety of organizational levels across the organization. IT systems can be effectively integrated through implementing business process management (BPM) – a newly emerging corporate IT concept, philosophy, and technology that help align business operations and IT supports in a competitive manner. This chapter first explores the concept of aligning business processes with IT systems. Surely, computing service processes are derived from the correlated business activities within a business unit or across business units, reflecting corporate best practices. How BPM can be well defined, modeled, and managed while integrating enterprise systems is then discussed. As the best practices evolves along with the changes in business operations for a competitive advantage, approaches to building the necessary agility in support of managing the changes of IT-driven business processes is finally discussed.