Public CIOs have a new imperative: optimize systems and processes. What lies behind this emerging trend is a series of mounting challenges. First, CIOs are struggling with the management of government's ever more complex processes, multitiered forms, numerous legacy systems (and data), and time-based legislative and mandated policies. Second, they are dealing with internal pressures to enhance cooperation and collaboration across agencies. Finally, CIOs must achieve their technology goals with shrinking budgets.

To address these issues, CIOs are turning to business process management (BPM) technology. BPM is a strategy that combines management methodologies, business processes and technologies to help organizations operate more efficiently, improve customer service, meet regulatory requirements and perform other tasks using best practices.

Beyond Process Automation: BPM as a Management Discipline
The focus on BPM as an organizational discipline has grown rapidly. It makes sense that BPM is moving to the forefront of CIO agendas: Processes are the foundation of any organization, and business processes influence all of an organization's key performance objectives - customer service, financial performance, compliance, productivity and competitive advantage. How well these processes are executed ultimately determines an organization's success or failure.

Along with this rising focus on process management and improvement, an evolution has come in the technology that helps automate, integrate, monitor and control processes. The market for BPM software and related services is growing at 15 to 35 percent a year according to analysts' forecasts. This growth is driven largely by the fact that the technology is maturing and there are numerous end-user case studies that validate that BPM works.

The past five years, BPM software evolved from its early roots in workflow to more comprehensive "pure-play" software that offers graphical process design, process automation, process monitoring and reporting capabilities for human-centric processes. Pure-play BPM software has delivered strong results for organizations worldwide and has helped drive more interest in BPM.

However, during this transition, the enterprise application integration providers have continued to address the need for complex integration and automation of system-based processes, while business intelligence providers have continued to meet corporate performance management needs, and business process analysis vendors have catered to organizations with more advanced process modeling and simulations.

While all are critical to business success, this technology market segmentation poses a challenge for buyers and IT organizations to purchase multiple applications and then piece them together. It's a cost, time and maintenance headache. This has led several of the leading pure-play BPM vendors to take the lead in expanding their solutions to encompass all of these areas - providing what has become known as a BPM Suite (BPMS).

A true BPMS allows CIOs to address the full, roundtrip process life cycle for both human-centric and system-based processes with a single, integrated solution from a single vendor. The life cycle includes modeling, integration, automation, management, monitoring, analysis, simulation and improvement - with the goal being to create the agility needed to continually repeat this cycle and fine-tune and optimize a business in near real time.

By supporting the big picture, BPMS lets the public sector:

• understand the agency's underlying dynamics, collaborate to ensure the pieces fit together and create agility within the overall enterprise strategy and architecture;
• map out an end state that maximizes the effectiveness of key business processes, intertwined with other enterprise assets, to achieve strategic objectives; and
• execute optimized, effective processes with cross-functional transparency and the flexibility to adapt and implement new ideas quickly.

Federal, state and local governments have been early adopters of BPM and BPMS for several interrelated reasons. Citizens demand satisfaction, and their expectations have risen dramatically. People not only want the privacy and security protections that are part of the government mission, they also have come to insist on the