By Charles Araujo
The Business Process Management (BPM) discipline is in the midst of a revival. In my recent analysis, entitled Will BPM Experience a Renaissance of Its Final Fall from Grace, I examined the state of the discipline, and the fate its practitioners face as the world around them is shifting. But what is unquestionable is that the need for BPM has never been greater—just not in the way it began. As I examined in my previous article, BPM started as a way of documenting and optimizing business processes to extract every ounce of efficiency possible from them. While optimization and efficiency remain relevant, they’re not what’s driving this 
renaissance in BPM.
Instead, it’s the now-critical need to create organizational agility, drive rapid innovation, and execute customer-centric digital transformation. As I examined in a recent article on CIO.com, these are now top-of-mind issues for every IT executive, and “the ability to deliver them in an organizational context is why BPM is starting to take a central role in some transformational efforts.”
For all of these reasons, BPM is—or at least should be—on your radar as you look to accelerate your transformational efforts and increase your rate of automation. But there’s also a good chance that struggles with past BPM efforts that led to bureaucracy and bloat, but little positive business impact, may be leading to a healthy dose of skepticism. It’s a legitimate concern, but one that new approaches and technology advancements are rendering unnecessary.
