Definitions
Association of Business Process Management Professionals International (ABPMP®), which is probably one of the most authoritative organizations when it comes to BPM, uses the following definition in its Guide to The Business Process Management Common Body Of Knowledge (BPM CBOK®): “Business Process Management (BPM) is a disciplined approach to identify, design, execute, document, measure, monitor, and control both automated and non-automated business processes to achieve consistent, targeted results aligned with an organization’s strategic goals. BPM involves the deliberate, collaborative and increasingly technology-aided definition, improvement, innovation, and management of end-to-end business processes that drive business results, create value, and enable an organization to meet its business objectives with more agility. BPM enables an enterprise to align its business processes to its business strategy, leading to effective overall company performance through improvements of specific work activities either within a specific department, across the enterprise, or between organizations.”
BPTrends uses the following definitions: “Business Process Management refers to a broad approach to managing the process work at an organization. It often refers to an effort to coordinate a number of different process approaches, including Lean, Six Sigma, Process Redesign, Human Performance Improvement, Decision Management, Business Rules and various types of process automation. Some use BPM to refer to the use of software applications to manage process analysis and runtime execution, but it is best to refer to BPM software tools as BPMS – business process management software.”
“Business processes describe how organizations organize to accomplish work. At its most generic, a business process is any set of activities performed by a business that is initiated by an event, transforms information, materials or business commitments, and produces an output of value to the organization or stakeholders of the process. Value chains and other large-scale business processes produce outputs that are valued by customers or other external stakeholders. Smaller processes generate outputs that are valued by other processes or by internal stakeholders, as, for example, employees or managers.” Those elements initiating a process, that were mentioned in the definition above are usually called inputs.
Gartner defines BPM in their Information Technology Glossary as follows: “Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable, or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT investments to business strategy.”
Business process is additionally defined by Gartner as: “an event-driven, end-to-end processing path that starts with a customer request and ends with a result for the customer. Business processes often cross departmental and even organizational boundaries.”
Finally, Roger Burlton in the Business Process Manifesto! uses the following working definition of a Business Process: “An organization’s Business Processes clearly describe the work performed by all resources involved in creating outcomes of value for its customers and other stakeholders.”