BPM industry exists for establishment and implementation of standards in the area of business processes. Standards are key instruments of BPM in implementation of its mission to formalize and improve business processes. BPM is dedicated to development and maintenance of standards. All history of BPM consists of evolution of standards. This is a continuous process.
Originally, BPM standards were very complex and vendor specific. With time, different vendors discovered more and more coincidence in standards they develop. This is a positive sign indicating an objective uniformity of business rules behind these standards. If a field of knowledge is principally irrelevant to formalization, then every private understanding of it will be not feasible for generalization. The fact that business standards of different vendors and consultants gradually converge proves the existence of a solid common base comprising a rule set of real business operations in terms of strict logical definitions.
Convergence of standards does not go easy. Every vendor is objectively interested in keeping his own standard private as much as possible. A dream of a vendor is delivery of monolith system, which solves all client tasks and doesn’t need any other system. However, real enterprise environments are too complex to allow for this scenario. There always exist a diversity of client technologies, which vendors call legacy but clients cherish as an essence of their business operations. A dream of clients is an easy integration of existing technologies with minimal cost. In this way, there appears a fierce competition between vendors interested in private standards and clients interested in universal and interoperable standards. Vendors are forced to follow client demands because support of standards becomes a key factor when making decisions on a purchase of BPM system.
In recent years, due to explosive growth of digital business platforms and general process automation we evidence rapid development and growing maturity on universal industry standards in various fields directly adjacent to BPM. It is only a matter of time when a “critical mass” of these standards will overweight isolationism of vendors and opens door to wider BPM standardization initiatives.
In our personal impression, this time is quite close because we see how more and more vendors showing interest in our universal approach to integrate versatile BPM systems existing today under umbrella of universal exchangeable meta-models and configurable process transformation rules ensuring transparent process standardization among different vendors. We believe that BPM industry is now really ready for the next round of standardization and, moreover, it has already begun.
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