Business Process Management has hit the IT scene as the latest step towards the Holy Grail of developing information systems whose architecture and capabilities are truly shaped by business needs. As Bruce Silver points out in Infoworld, BPM promises to 'free business logic from the bonds of existing infrastructure to enable unprecedented agility'.

BPM offers both a means of modelling and evaluating existing business processes for logical flaws and inefficiencies, and the tools to rapidly develop IS that are fully integrated into these processes. BPM does this over four stages - model, design, deploy and manage - all of which are combined under a single architecture.

Over the next few weeks Get Somebody Now will bring you a series of articles analysing and assessing the hype around BPM. As an introduction, we recommend Bruce Silver's piece, which available by following the link here .

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