Business Process Management (BPM) garners much attention in the technology market. The media forecasts enormous growth for BPM and its supporting technologies. Most of the coverage focuses on tactical issues related to specific components of BPM and on commentators’ musings on technological nuances and specifications. Industry analysts support the media’s reports of BPM technology growth.

The focus of the media and others may be on the related technologies, but BPM is not and should not be thought of as solely a technology. It is a practice that uses technologies to achieve its ends, but the technologies are not the ends in themselves. BPM is about improving business operations with supporting technology. BPM entails a fundamental shift in an organization’s mindset; functional boundaries, static processes and technology-driven business processes must all yield to this shift in mindset. The end goal of BPM is simple but critical: optimizing your business processes.

The premise of this paper is that enterprise process modelling, analysis, architecture and implementation are at the core of business process management and optimization. Topics covered include process modelling collaboration considerations, process architectures versus enterprise architectures and the requirements for linkages between the two and process implementation issues.