Scalable NAS Room

SAP Signals BPM Intentions

May 13, 2009

Continued IT investment is not a sure thing in these tough times, but business process management may be an area that showcases IT's value.

One of the things that make it very tough to be in IT during a downturn is that business executives start to wonder about the value of investing in IT more than ever. The question about the value of IT has always hung over the industry as a whole, but continuing investments in technology were always taken pretty much as a matter of faith. Even if the investment did not provide a competitive edge, at the very least the investment in IT was needed to make sure rivals did not have some unfair advantage.

But as we experience the severest economic downturn since the Great Depression, business executives are less enamored with IT than ever. And the real question is what IT executives, and the vendors that support them, need to do to regain the confidence of the business community?

A significant clue to the future direction of enterprise IT came from SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker. Scheduled shortly to become the sole CEO of SAP, Apotheker said that with the release of version 7 of SAP's core ERP application suite, SAP will be focusing more on business process management and integration. He implied that SAP will be delivering a layer of software across its suite of applications that will not only make it easier to integrate and manage business processes, but with the arrival of a project he referred to as Constellation will be able to extend that BPM capability across a network of inter-related corporations and organizations.

BPM is not exactly a new concept. But it is a concept that has not been as broadly implemented as it should be. One of the biggest sources of the disconnect between IT and the business is that IT executives still tend to think in terms of application components that constitute an enterprise resource planning suite. From an IT perspective, IT is about managing general ledger, customer relationship management and supply chain applications.

In contrast, business executives think in terms of business processes such as order to cash. Those processes tend to span multiple applications, but integrating those assets into a cohesive set of applications that represent a business process has been the exception rather than the rule in IT. Obviously, companies such as Lombardi, IBM, Microsoft, SoftwareAG and Tibco and others have helped pioneered the BPM space, but BPM adoption remains slight and overly fragmented.

Should SAP follow up on Apotheker's commitment to BPM, the potential to change the way IT people think about the relationship between IT and the business is huge. Given the current state of the economy, the need to advance the state of the enterprise IT has never been more important. While SAP may not be the first IT vendor to come up with the idea, the company's ability to exercise a positive influence on helping to close the historic divide between IT and the business community should not be discounted.