An evaluation framework for business process management products

Abstract

The number of BPM products available has increased substantially in the last years, so that choosing among these products became a difficult task for potential BPM users. This paper defines a framework for evaluating BPM products, and discusses how this framework has been applied in the development of an open and objective evaluation method for these products. Our framework has been developed based on the BPM lifecycle we developed as a result of a thorough literature survey. Our method consists of a set of criteria, a test case and a rating schema. The paper also discusses how we evaluated our method (and indirectly our framework) by applying it to three BPM tool suites. We show that our method allows the rigorous comparison of these products according to different criteria, so that the choice of BPM product can be tuned to the specific goals of the users of these products. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.