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Reviewer: Donald Rajinder Chand

The growing emphasis on process orientation in organizations in conjunction with advances in workflow technology led to the coining of the term "business process management" (BPM) in the early 2000s. In the last five years, two noticeable views of BPM have emerged. In the US, the focus of BPM is on the management of business processes that cross boundaries and are embedded and/or integrated within multiple information technology (IT) systems. In Europe, BPM researchers have fostered the view that BPM is a set of tools, techniques, and approaches for managing business processes that are executed on business process management systems (BPMS). This book, written by four European academics, is the first textbook on BPM, and its BPM worldview is naturally European. The content is organized around the BPM life cycle, which is a slight refinement of the traditional business process improvement (BPI) life cycle. For example, the traditional phases of the BPI life cycle are process identification, process discovery, process analysis, process design, process implementation, and process monitoring. In the BPM life cycle used in this book, the process design phase is renamed to process redesign, process implementation is replaced with process automation, and process monitoring is merged into process intelligence. In the process identification phase of the BPM life cycle, the relevant processes are identified, delimited, and linked to each other, yielding a framework called the process architecture. In the process discovery phase, the scope of each process in the process architecture is documented in terms of start and end points, intermediate subprocesses, subprocess interfaces, span of responsibility, process metrics, and so on. In the process analysis phase, the as-is process is analyzed for defects and process issues are identified, quantified, and documented. In the process redesign phase, an improved process is designed to address the issues identified in the process analysis phase. In the process automation phase, the redesigned process, expressed in a process model, is executed using software for business process management notation (BPMN). In the process intelligence phase, the performance of the executed process is enhanced using business intelligence features in the BPMN software. Each chapter starts with an overview, then presents the topics associated with that chapter, and closes with a recap, solutions to exercises, further exercises, and further reading. The content is meticulously crafted and skillfully rooted in the BPM literature. The concepts are illustrated using several running examples involving business activities rooted in simple processes such as an order-to-cash fulfillment process or a prescription filling process at a pharmacy. Since a critical part of BPM is creating correct process models and executing those models on process model software, this book devotes two chapters to modeling in BPMN and two chapters to executing and monitoring business processes on BPMN software. Although this is a succinct introduction to the BPM field, in my judgment it is oriented toward engineering and IT students who develop executable process models and configure business process management systems. I found the writing style, although efficient, to be narrative and factual. BPM tools are relatively simple, but the machines (that is, the business processes) to which they are applied are quite complex. Because of this, it is essential that a BPM textbook bring out and discuss the subtleties and tradeoffs in process work. This book is weak in this aspect. Management students will find that the book barely addresses the topic of process governance. In addition, the chapters on process analysis are too skeletal to meet the knowledge requirements of business process professionals in the US who shape process metrics programs, ensure strategy and business process alignment, and implement the managerial processes girding business process management. More reviews about this item: Amazon , Goodreads Online Computing Reviews Service