Programming technologies will equip the programmers with limited in-built features. Of course additional Frameworks can be deployed on top of them to reduce product time to market and deliver solutions faster. But still it’s an old game.
BPMS is no doubt a future programming approach and when installed, will equip the programmers with tons of features to automate/simulate/analyze processes along with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Case Management features. An iBPMS is more than a BPMS with Intelligent Business Operations features, in-built predictive/adaptive decision capabilities, advanced analysis tools, advanced integrated tools. Very intuitive designer portals will make a programmer more productive and deliver cost-effective & model-driven solutions. BPMS is an intelligent programming platform with a ‘give more to end-users’ approach unlike the traditional approach of gathering requirements from clean slate. Yes, a BPMS contains in-built features to enter/update/review work along with electronic document management features. Business Process teams can also report on the work using BAM capabilities to Monitor service levels for the tasks, process quality, productivity of users, work allocation etc. BPMS in one way is attracting the technical community with its non-coding approach enabling the IT teams to deliver solutions quickly by yielding more Return on Investment (ROI). A such, there is no bench mark to call a technology as a BPMS except exploring the features related to process modelling, designing, optimizing, implementing, maintaining, supporting the processes to take the businesses to next level in this competitive world. Few years back there were only few technology vendors in this arena and now every other vendor have BPM/BPMS acronyms widely added to their product features or websites. A simple comparison for traditional programming environments vs an BPMS/iPBMS will be as follows: An IBPMS is more likely a building-blocks game so that the designer/programmers can assemble the pieces together to meet the customer/client needs with loads of in-built features for corss-industry needs.
Process automation happens in three simple steps:
1) Understand and Feed requirements into an iBPMS (these are executable requirements which will generate the code resulting for skeleton applications)
2) Model the processes (single or multi-process) as part of step-1
3) Implement (again using non-coding techniques).
Even the Integrated Development Platforms are gone Web-based making the infrastructure outsourcing (for hardware and software needs) or Cloud Computing an easy task. Development/Testing/Production environments are just few minutes away within the time the payment of your credit card/check card goes through.