The term "process agility" is too often passed over as a check on a checklist when companies are evaluating business process management suites (BPMS's). Getting a process up and running is the easy part. Keeping your processes current as changes occur to the business is the real challenge. Effective human or people-centric BPMS technologies (those that specialize in work done by people) are built to facilitate imminent change, even to processes currently in-flight.

Capabilities of an Agile BPMS Technology

• The ability to make in-flight changes to a process or processes without having to re-start the process from the beginning or without having to re-boot or re-start the server
• The ability to pause or re-start a process at any point
• The ability to deploy new versions of a process without affecting existing running instances
• The ability to specify the date and time a new version of a process should take effect without being dependent on staff to deploy the process at a specific date and time

An Architecture Built for Agility

Bluespring takes an Interpretive XML approach to process execution instead of compiling code (traditional approach taken by most BPMS vendors). Forrester Research, Gartner, IDC and Aberdeen all recognize the process agility advantages of Interpretive XML.