Process Is 'In'

 

At the beginning of this year, I made predictions about the overall trends in IT and trends in distributed computing. I predicted that in 2002 one of the popular technologies would be the rise of BPM (business process management) and its associated technologies like workflow automation and process automation.

Process engineering and process automation are by no means new science or new disciplines for many of us. Process engineers have been practicing their craft for many years, but many of their efforts have been focused on industrial environments and not business environments. For many IT managers today, however, the whole notion of process engineering is new and challenging. I would like to explore that phenomenon a little bit in this column.

Software engineers have been writing software systems for the last 30 to 40 years using one of two primary system abstractions. Systems are either process-centric or data-centric. Those two categories encompass an awful lot of software systems. A further categorization divides software systems into systems that support business functions and those that support industrial functions or life critical real-time functions. Of course, there are business functions in industrial systems and some real-time component of business systems. The classification is not mutually exclusive and there is overlap. However the main discriminator of the…

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