The changing Business Process Analysis (BPA) marketplace

The Business Process Analysis (BPA) market is evolving. There are strong market forces are work. And this change is being recognised by Gartner who comment on and rate software vendors.

Over the last 5 years BPA tools have been used by Business Analyst (BAs). BAs are all about building systems or configuring systems and they used to be the final word on how the business should run. They were the experts on analysing the business. So the BPA tools have been developed to support the requirements of BAs; data modelling, entity relationship diagrams, flowcharting, metadata, Rumbaugh object modelling, and strong analytical tools.

But the BPA market is changing for a number of reasons. More and more companies are recognising that business change can develop greater benefits than systems change As increasingly business are relying on software packages, it reduces the need for data analysis. Finally, end-users are developing far more power, and they want to take ownership of the process design and analysis as they will have the on-going task of maintenance and continuous improvement.

Clearly the current BPA market leaders, as judged by Gartner in the BPA Magic Quadrant, (IDS Scheer, Casewise, Popkin) have evolved to serve a different set of requirement – those of the BAs. But as the demand for change management becomes stronger the current BPA vendors are looking at the functionality they need to support a different breed of user – the “end user”. Real people out in the trenches dealing with customers, producing products, paying the bills etc. Their requirements are all about associated with widescale adoption of changes in working practices; change management.

As there is currently no recognised market for change management applications, the BPA market is the closest to satisfying the requirements, and is where we should look to try and predict the future winners.

But just as IBM PC was wrong footed by the more nimble Dell’s and Gateway’s who have gone one to dominate the market, this “discontinuous change” in requirements could bring other vendors to the forefront which are better suited to meeting the requirements.

So why “discontinuous change”? Because it requires a different type of thinking, as illustrated by the table below, and many of the requirements for the BAs cannot co-exist with the end-user requirements. It is a functionality compromise.

Functionality BA perspective End-user perspective
Process mapping Capable of being “executed” by a workflow engine Capable of being understood by my mother
Data modelling Support for BPN / BPEL / etc notation Export capability at lowest levels
Access Key BA’s with powerful PCs Dynamic to anybody with a browser-enabled device
Ease of use Once trained, easily used Intuitive, just like their favourite website
Appealing to use Not necessary as power users Critical to encourage adoption
Personalisation Not required Critical to eliminate information overload
Performance/uptime Fast PC 100% availability
Multi-language English is business language Personalised multi-lingual support
Authorisation Version control Full ISO/FDA/FSA compliance

So why are the BPA vendors trying to change, as there s still demand from BAs? The reason is pure license fees. A 1000 person organisation has 1000 end-users, but only 20 BAs. But for some vendors they will only be able to access this end-user market with a complete ground-up re-development. And this is not out of the question. Cognos has stolen market share from its arch-rival Business Objects by the development of the hugely successful ReportNet – a completely new web-based reporting platform. But this was no small undertaking, requiring a huge proportion of the development team for 3 years.

The analysts that cover the markets (Butler, Gartner, Forrester and Ventana Research) often have very different views. However, they have managed to agree on one thing. That is, that control-ES (www.control-ES.com) has upset the happy established BPA status quo and is currently setting the standard for the change management marketplace.