Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) is rightly popular today because of the productivity gains that it can help provide, has Henry Ford clearly demonstrated at the beginning of the last century already. Today, especially with larger and more complex enterprises, multi-organization processes, rich adaptive case management requirements, and the importance, availability, and power of automation as well as of information processing and technology, the requirements for business process optimization have grown, again exponentially.

First Rule
Optimizing Information technology is especially crucial as IT is a powerful accelerator that subscribes to the “garbage in = garbage out” principle.

Business Knowledge
While there usually is a clear difference between, let's say a business process and a business rule, to get a clear understanding and control, for example, to evolve and optimize the process and/or the rule (or any other resource), the knowledge that these resources represent must be adequately understood, modeled, and structured, into managed knowledge architecture.

Interrelated Process Networks
Business processes are important business resources, where other business resources collaborate, based on their respective capabilities and motivations, to deliver other resources required by the value chain which is a business process of business processes.

Integration
All through these complex processes, multiple changing and evolving cases, at all levels, need to be tracked, managed, and referenced. All these resources and processes are governed by business rules and orchestrated according to workflow patterns. All of this fits into a business architecture which is typically part of an enterprise architecture. Add to this that many processes can be provided and subscribed to as services, often from external organizations and "Clouds", and the depth of the relations and interdependencies become evident.