Does anyone know the challenges, requirements, and issues you face in your job better than you do? Who better understands that when you’re trying to resolve a case, you need to be able to instigate workflows, collaborate with everyone involved, and be able to check-in on the status at anytime, anywhere, and on any device?

That means that when it comes time to find a solution for better process efficiency, it’s more often than not the line of business driving the initiative. However since one of the biggest challenges users reported as a roadblock in their BPM implementation was a conflict over process ownership between IT and business stakeholders*, it’s imperative that you get equal buy in from the line of business and IT.

You see, even though organizations of all sizes, business models and industries talk about the essential nature of IT and business alignment, achieving that balance is often easier said than done. Part of the challenge is the growing complexity and interdependencies of business processes, as organizations strive to break down traditional operating silos not only by sharing information but also by creating “cultures of collaboration” that help integrate and better leverage essential business processes.

In particular, enterprises want to use technology to unify and strengthen the three pillars of their organization: people, processes and information. The successful integration of these three elements is at the heart of long-term, demonstrable business performance. Another key concern  IT and business leaders have with BPM is how best to utilize it in order to go past nice but unspectacular incremental improvements in favor of disruptive, revolutionary enhancements that help the organization achieve competitive advantage.

Despite the desire to do more with BPM, according to a recent study from Forrester Research, 59% of enterprise architecture respondents use BPM not for strategic requirements, but rather for finding bottlenecks, refining processes and reduce operating costs, which is not a great way to get a good ROI. Instead, the right solution needs to have significant functionality, high performance and can be deployed in a variety of architectural designs for maximum flexibility while still meeting the need for speed and agility.

Four key components to look for in your BPM solution:

• Packaged applications : Look for applications that capture best practices and domain-specific components, and package them into turnkey applications that require only configuration and light customization to meet the need of an organization.
• Solutions accelerators: By utilizing prebuilt and reusable components, developers in the line of business or IT can build applications using coarse-grained service components and prebuilt application elements, reducing the time to value and utilizing service delivery best practices built into the components.
• Model-driven development : Robust modelling environments to develop applications using BPMN-based process modelling tools, or CMMN-based case modelling (the emerging standard for case management modelling), are also important. The platform should also include a service-oriented architecture-compliant framework so developers can create, utilize and reuse Web services in the development of applications, and also leverage the enterprise service bus functionality for more complex integration work that goes beyond typical Web services integration.
• Code-level development: The solution should provide resources and support for developers that includes code snippets, comprehensive libraries, reusable elements and services, and developer communities for developers to engage with others.

With these tips in mind, you’ll not only be able to find a BPM solution that fits your needs, but also one IT can stand behind because of its flexibility to constantly adapt to changing requirements without reinventing the wheel each time. It’s also important to note that the way applications are developed is usually a mix of these for different solutions, and sometimes even within the same solution, so it’s imperative to have all of these available to you. Now you can work with IT and find a solution that evolves with your organization, instead of working against it.

Want to learn more about how to make the business case for BPM? Download the Tech Target white paper, “ Selling the Benefits of Business Process Management for IT and Business Stakeholders ” today.

*InfoWorld BPM Survey for OpenText 2014