
A  business process comprises a "series or network of value-added  activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to  purposefully achieve the common business goal." These processes are  critical to any organization: they may generate revenue and often  represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial approach,  BPM considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that  must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added  products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to  other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process  methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that  this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure  the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change.  In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a "change capability" to an  organization - both human and technological. As such, many BPM articles  and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or  technology.
Roughly  speaking, the idea of (business) process is as traditional as concepts  of tasks, department, production, outputs. The current
[update]  management and improvement approach, with formal definitions and  technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business  process modeling). Note that in the IT community, the term 'business  process' is often used as synonymous of management of middleware  processes; or integrating application software tasks. This viewpoint may  be overly restrictive - a limitation to keep in mind when reading  software engineering papers that refer to "business processes" or to  "business process modeling".
Although  the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of business processes  with the use of information technology, it has since been extended to  integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place  in series or parallel with the use of technology. For example (in  workflow systems), when individual steps in the business process require  human intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are assigned  to appropriate members within the organization.
More  advanced forms such as human interaction management are in the complex  interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In  this case, many people and systems interact in structured, ad-hoc, and  sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions.
BPM  can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that  would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views  include the relationships of processes to each other which, when  included in a process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis  that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some as the backbone of enterprise content management.
Because  BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology  infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes  (software) or solving business problems (suite). BPM enables business to  respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster  than competitors - creating competitive advantage.