Why You Should Know the Term CEBPM

The term 'communications-enabled business process modeling' (CEBPM) might as well be in a foreign language to a vast majority of business leaders; unfortunately, those are the folks who could benefit most by integrating the concept into their business. It would be easiest to define CEBPM by breaking it into two parts – CE & BPM.

The latter, BPM, is known to most at least at a high level; business process modeling is creating custom software by visually defining workflows with the initial development done by analysts, not programmers. Implementing BPM has long been reserved for Fortune 1000-type companies, those with deeper pockets and the comfort of having staffs of people whose day-to-day focus is on long-term strategic advantages instead of strictly day-to-day operations.

The former, communications-enabled (CE), is defined by integrating the ever-needed communications element directly into your business process models. Being able to offer this within a development platform has long been an aspiration of platform vendors.

Let us offer another, simpler definition: With CEBPM, both inbound and outbound email, SMS and telephony can be included in your software development, which can be defined by business analysts rather than a team of programmers.

Delving further into the details of CEBPM, several key elements should be addressed:

• Business process modeling with a CEBPM platform means that your technically-competent business resources define your custom software directly in the development platform. The work those resources do is the programming foundation for the software that will run your business. Subtracting the development team's interpretation of paper requirements reduces time spent and thus, saves money
• Eliminating the need for the development team to interpret paper requires also reduces communication risk. Communication risk is one of the least acknowledged risk categories but can be one of the most costly.
• Communications is critical to your business. With CEBPM, the communications element is built directly into the platform and there is no need for any other development platform.
• CEBPM, by its very nature, immediately introduces SOA (service-oriented architecture) in to your organization. Your custom software inherently has access to all its internal systems and in many cases important external systems. That data, with the drop of a few model elements, can easily be aggregated and made available via web service, telephony or any other way your business requires.
• Lastly, business process modeling is akin to agility. Developing software with a modeling tool rather than traditional coding offers business the luxury of quickly and relatively inexpensively updating and amending your software.

Until recently, BPM was offered by only a few vendors worldwide and those platforms were not marketed to small- and mid-sized companies. With open source software, that has begun to change. Still, regardless of cost, few offer a platform that converges data and communications in one platform…until now. There's a new player you should research – StarPound Technologies. StarPound's CEBPM engine is open source. They offer training on the web. For small companies they will host your application in the cloud and larger companies are welcome to host the software themselves.

StarPound seeks to become the best open-source alternative to commercial CEBPM providers. Our founders already changed your banking habits by being the first to successfully introduce Internet banking, and we feel that CEBPM, if adopted, can change the world considerably more than banking over the Internet.