BPM is an ongoing journey

Organizations are composed of processes. Not only organizations, but anything that surround us, that has some type of function, can be described as a series of steps followed to achieve some desired goal. For me, I think the perfect machine, with perfect processes, is the human body. Every function is delimited, has a series of steps, and evolution has made of these processes an art, making them perfect. Every single one of them.

The same thing happens in our businesses. There's a workflow to be followed for almost any function. The only difference, with our bodies for example, is that they are not perfect. In the majority of businesses we don't event know the steps of processes because they are not documented, making it more difficult to correct errors.

When you want to make processes in an organization better, you need to correct errors, eliminate steps, maybe automate others, etc. But there's always some tweaking to do until you reach an acceptable level of performance. That's why business process management is an every day task. It's not a project that finished today.

From this article: "Both BPM and SOA could be thought of as a way of thinking about how the business and governance model should be designed and a way of delivering the technology and applications to support that design," Miers says. "Both concepts involve a journey, not a destination. At their core, both employ an iterative approach to business performance improvement."

New processes appear every day. They come from new campaigns, new product or services offering and also from changing directions of companies. Also actual workflows change due to market needs. BPM and workflow solutions will give the flexibility businesses needs for adjusting and creating these processes allowing them to face competition and increase their performance in an ongoing basis.