Changing face of Business Process Analysis

The Business Process Analysis (BPA) market is evolving. There are strong market forces are work. And this change is being recognised by Gartner who comment on and rate software vendors.

Over the last 5 years BPA tools have been used by Business Analyst (BAs). BAs are all about building systems or configuring systems and they used to be the final word on how the business should run. They were the experts on analysing the business. So the BPA tools have been developed to support the requirements of BAs; data modelling, entity relationship diagrams, flowcharting, metadata, object modelling, and strong analytical tools.

But the BPA market is changing for a number of reasons. End-users are developing far more power, and they want to take ownership of the process design and analysis as they will have the on-going task of maintenance and continuous improvement.

These ar real people out in the trenches dealing with customers, producing products, paying the bills etc. Their requirements are all about associated with widescale adoption of changes in working practices; change management.

As there is currently no recognised market for change management applications, the BPA market is the closest to satisfying the requirements, and is where we should look to try and predict the future winners. But just as IBM PC was wrong footed by the more nimble Dell who has gone one to dominate the market, this “discontinuous change” in requirements could bring other vendors to the forefront which are better suited to meeting the requirements.

So why “discontinuous change”? Because it requires a different type of thinking, as illustrated by the table below, and many of the requirements for the BAs cannot co-exist with the end-user requirements. It is a functionality compromise.

Functionality BA perspective End-user
Process mapping Capable of being “executed” by a workflow engine Capable of being understood by my mother
Data modelling Support for BPN / BPEL / etc notation Export capability at lowest levels
Access Key BA’s with powerful PCs Dynamic to anybody with a browser-enabled device
Ease of use Once trained, easily used Intuitive, just like their favourite website
Appealing to use Not necessary as power users Critical to encourage adoption
Personalisation Not required Critical to eliminate information overload
Performance Fast PC 24X7 100% availability
Multi-language English is business language Personalised multi-lingual support
Authorisation Version control Full ISO/FDA/FSA compliance and audit trail

The analysts that cover the markets (Butler, Gartner, Forrester and Ventana Research) often have very different views. However, they have managed to agree on one thing. That is, that control-ES (www.control-ES.com) has upset the happy established BPA status quo and is currently setting the standard for the change management marketplace.