What complex is to develop a new information system today ?
From business procedures automation to business processes automation

During the last days I have been working in the preparation of the XXV Salón de Informatica: "Software's Enterprise Architecture", the most important event of ACIS (The Colombia's bigger association of computer science professionals). As part of the preparation activities, I have discussed some interesting subjects on software development with my co-worker Juan Carlos Cardenas.

One of them is the complexity associated for developing a new software solution that support the today business requirements. The new software solutions must be structured around business processes but the old software solutions were structured around business procedures.

- Business processes or business procedures What are the differences?

Since twenty years ago the end-users of the software application have been employees, for those who the automation of some specific manual procedures was enough to increase the productivity of their activities. But right now, the end-users of the new solutions are the customers, who are requesting to the company the automation of the business processes that define the company value chain. Each interaction performed by one customer to the company implies or fires a set of events crossing the company, affecting all information systems and humans that support the business process that solves the customer request or deliveries the goods.

This approach shows the importance for a company to align all IT and software initiatives to the business processes. In this way, the complexity related to develop new software solutions is directly associated to the process-oriented "fashion" under the new information system should be built.

It's so nice to hear comments, examples, news and anything else from you around this issue.