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Preface

The field of Business Process Management (BPM) is marred by a seemingly end-
less sequence of (proposed) industry standards. Contrary to other fields (e.g., civil
or electronic engineering), these standards are not the result of a widely supported
consolidation of well-understood and well-established concepts and practices. In the
BPM domain, it is frequently the case that BPM vendors opportunistically become
involved in the creation of proposed standards to exert or maintain their influence
and interests in the field. Despite the initial fervor associated with such standardiza-
tion activities, it is no less frequent that vendors either choose to drop their support
for standards that they earlier championed on an opportunistic basis or elect only to
partially support them in their commercial offerings.
Moreover, the results of the standardization processes themselves are a concern.
BPM standards tend to deal with complex concepts, yet they are never properly
defined and all-too-often not informed by established research. The result is a
plethora of languages and tools, with no consensus on concepts and their implemen-
tation. They also fail to provide clear direction in the way in which BPM standards
should evolve.
One can also observe a dichotomy between the “business” side of BPM and its
“technical” side. While it is clear that the application of BPM will fail if not placed
in a proper business context, it is equally clear that its application will go nowhere
if it remains merely a motivational exercise with schemas of business processes
hanging on the wall gathering dust.
An important observation that can be made about the state-of-the-art in BPM
relates to tool support. Tool support has evolved considerably in the past decade,
both in terms of the breadth of functionality that is provided and in terms of the
range and capabilities of the vendors who are involved. However, because of the
lack of effective standardization and direction in the field, BPM technology is not
widely used. Commercial BPM tools are rarely used in small and medium-sized
enterprises because of their prohibitive total cost of ownership. Acquisition costs
tend to be high, and ongoing operational support and maintenance commitments
can be even higher. One factor in this is that the closed nature of these products
means that their customization to specific client requirements may be difficult or
even impossible to achieve, and only the biggest users may be able to influence
their future feature set. Another issue is the scarcity of knowledge about individual

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