How the Advent of BPM Software Revolutionized Business Management

An evolution has been taking place in the world of business process management for last five decades. The highly sophisticated BPM software solutions of today is a product of years of evolution of management practices.

Over time, cross-influences between different theories of management and the computer science, and the urge to find better ways to leverage data for business effectiveness resulted in the invention of BPM Software.

Business process management can be seen as an extension of Workflow Management (WFM). However, WFM focuses primarily on automation of business processes while BPM digs deeper into the broader support – for example by supporting business intelligence, simulation and case management, among other things.

BPM Software: Beginning of the Revolution

Both the 1960’s and 1970’s marked critical eras for business managers. Although the pieces of information systems they had would not allow a non-programmer to perform complicated data analysis and generate reports that would aid in decision-making, there was some good progress.

Companies and researchers were developing tools that businesses could use to access and extract data from mainframe-based batch systems. However, these tools required specific technical expertise that many businesses of the day didn’t have.

And, more poignantly, the business information systems stored data in a way that would lead to massive inaccuracies, resulting in partial records, missing values, inaccurate information, misspelled information and much more.

So, two things –  low quality of data and lack of technical expertise (programming knowledge) that hindered the success rate of business process management systems during that period.

Developments During The Industrial Age 1960’s

Businesses’ use of technology for managerial analysis that informed decision-making gathered steam by around 1950s-60s. This is the period when the corridors of academia and practitioner circles begun adopting management information systems (MIS) as a body of knowledge – and a tool that could possibly help leverage computers for corporate management.

During those times, organizations had not fully utilized the computing power of the day to manage and process and analyze data. The MIS thinkers envisioned an environment that elevated the use of technology from the clerical administrative data processing to a more advanced user. As a result, such computer systems would provide a corporate-wide integrated interactive environment that managers could exploit for analysis and decision-making.

The foundation of this new, ground-breaking capability would be a ‘data hub’, or a ‘database’ – the ‘data safe’ where enterprise-wide data would be stored in an integrated manner. However, the kind of functionality envisioned by MIS thinkers predated the required technology. By 1960, technology wasn’t sophisticated enough to deliver such interactive and the clean data integration.

During those times, managers relied on mainframe-based batch-oriented report generators. These systems used querying modules to generate structured periodic reports that would help managers in decision-making.

However, there were also file management software that was used in ‘data processing’ departments – IT departments of those times. However, such solutions were developed to ease the burden of technical staff and data analysts and were not tailored for use by business managers. Besides, generating the simplest of reports, actually, out of the accounting systems would call for the heavy involvement of the technical staff.

The arrival of cheaper and more powerful mini computers was a good news and an opportunity integrated business management evangelists of the day to achieve their visions.

Researchers with access to these new computers begun experimenting, developing and implementing better technological solutions for modeling and decision support. At the same time, the MIS theory evolved to understand and accommodate human-computer interaction in the information-system based decision-making.

Now, it is the confluence of these developments that resulted in the birth of new business information systems christened Decision Support Systems (DSS).

Decision Support Systems were defined as computer information systems that offered support both for unstructured and semi-structured managerial decision-making.

During that period, various prominent researchers and thinkers came up with different concepts of DSS model and helped implement the early models for different applications – portfolio management and product pricing during the early 1970s.

Turning Points – 2000, and Beyond

Miniaturization of devices and availability of networked computers meant the generation of tons of data. In the 2000s, businesses started experiencing an era of Big Data revolution fueled by the internet and the increasing number of connected devices.  

Find out the turning point where the revolution started in BPM Software. Read the full report here

All the above-mentioned facts and statistics have been generated from data collected by the SoftwareSuggest team.