Prime Time for Real Time - BPM and the Real Time Enterprise

By Peter Fingar

Executives are buzzing about the notion of the real-time enterprise. It's not the latest "killer application," but a management strategy that calls for squeezing time and associated costs out of processes, transforming how companies operate and even the very businesses they're in.

General Electric, JetBlue, Virgin Group, Progressive Insurance and others are harnessing the universal, real-time connectivity of the Internet for business process innovation. While the concept of time-based competition isn't new, the ability to execute on this management ideal with computer-assisted process support is.

Some enterprises look to new technology architectures and composite applications as the route to the real-time enterprise, but this article explains why time-based competition demands a business process management approach. By giving business analysts software to build and manipulate end-to-end processes, companies are dramatically improving response times to routine customer transactions and emerging market demands by bypassing lengthy software development cycles.