In an effort to educate the IT and business leaders about the strategic role of business process management (BPM), John Wiley & Sons has added BPM Basics For Dummies to its stable of well-known For Dummies series of books.

Sponsored by Software AG and co-authored by Bruce Williams, the company's senior vice president of business process management solutions, the book aims to be a generic overview of the methods and technologies used to apply BPM to improve business performance.

In Sydney for the book's launch, Williams said the definition of BPM has been "all over the map" so he wanted to help educate people what BPM is about as the benefits of its application can be very compelling to an organization.

"We see the business of process modelling is arcane for business people," Williams said. "IT people can look at it but the business people don't."

"BPM is designed right now for well-orchestrated processes and to execute something repeatable. For some companies this is a large part of their business, but for others it is only a small part."

Williams said in many companies business processes just evolved so the new frontier for BPM is dealing with the orchestration of ad hoc processes.

"The ability to put together idea generation in a supportive sense is the future," he said.

According to Gartner, the BPM software market reached nearly $1.7 billion by the end of 2006 and is the second fastest growing middleware market segment with a growth rate of 24 percent from 2006 to 2011.

Prior to joining Software AG, Williams had a 20-year career in the aerospace industry and worked on projects like the Hubble Space Telescope.

After discovering Six Sigma, he spent seven years doing consulting and wrote another book, Six Sigma For Dummies.

A free copy of BPM Basics For Dummies can be downloaded from Software AG.