As we open the chapter on a new decade, let me explain why I think that, over the next ten years, Business Process Management (BPM) is headed for Board level agenda, will touch every corner of the enterprise, and will be the hottest place to work.

It's tempting to think that BPM was just a decade-long party, that the biographers of business in the Noughties won't even see it as significant next to the impact of the web and the virtualisation of the enterprise, as manifested in the huge growth in outsourcing, offshoring and shared services.

And it's true that, for all the millions of dollars spent, BPM has been an ill-defined and vague term, meaning anything from an IT workflow application through to organisational culture. And its meaning has shifted significantly over the years, as thought leaders have learned from experience in the field [and vendors have weighed in with big marketing budgets].

But, despite all that, BPM is increasingly recognised as the key to rescuing process management from silo views and project perspectives. It is coming to be seen as enterprise-wide and business-led, as the engine room that drives transformation, improvement and compliance.

I think this is the end of the beginning for BPM, which is set to become one of the strategic themes of the coming decade, even if it changes its name along the way.

How We Got Here

Back in the ‘80s, businesses first began to think seriously about process. They often invested in process mapping to underpin Quality Management initiatives. But usually it went nowhere and became very back-office, and a career dead-end - essential for compliance but otherwise just an overhead.

In the '90s the focus shifted to Process Re-Engineering and enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations. We realised that the huge sums spent on process re-engineering programs were mostly wasted because the change didn't stick.