How BPM can help to cope with business complexity?

Predominant trend of business development in technology age is growing complexity. This complexity is not concentrated densely in any specific area, such as IT but is distributed evenly across all areas and aspects of business.

At certain stage it became evident that it is impossible to hold and manage growing complexity of business by traditional means of classic business administration. BPM came to scene as a way to cope with versatility and volatility of modern business environments through systematic modeling and structuring organizations towards contemporary technology trends.

The idea appeared so tempting that many first stage BPMS pretended to be one stop solution for all business operations, especially in IT field. Of course, it was an exaggeration and false interpretation of real complexity challenge, which caused this development.

Consequently, the scope of BPM systems gradually dissolved into various workflow engines and form processors. Of course, this scope is too narrow and far from the original challenge, which brought BPM to agenda. It gradually eroded the original value of BPM by accidental associations with incomplete and limited systems from various IT domains.

However, the relevance of the original problem of managing complex business systems did not diminish but, on the contrary, continuously grows with progressive expansion of technology and digital platforms. It leaves no doubt that we will see explosive growth of BPM in next years on new level of universality and flexibility.

In terms of IT, we can expect that BPM will focus in a short prospect on micro-services and universal API tools to establish wider and more flexible system interaction. On wider scope we will definitely see deeper integration of business with equipment, robotics and IoT. BPM approach has no viable alternatives in unification of all these modern business trends.