White papers

Business process management (BPM) solutions have been successful in helping many companies increase the agility and responsiveness of their IT infrastructure and improving the flexibility of their applications and processes to meet new business requirements. Yet many BPM solutions require significant investment in time, money and resources to implement and often require a significant focus on IT infrastructure-related issues.

While Upside Research projects the general BPM market to continue to continue growing steadily over the next five years, we also believe that there are a large number of companies that need more tactical, process-driven solutions for specific tasks. We believe that while standard BPM platform vendors will continue to dominate the move towards enterprise process-centric computing, there are some interesting up and coming companies that provide a straightforward solution for a different, task-oriented process management challenge. Request management is a good example of this type of challenge.

Request management is a category of process management that focuses on automating common requests that exist in corporate departments. While request management can be applied to any department, the departments most often in need of an automated solution are IT, sales and marketing, and finance. Request management focuses on creating a workflow and automated process for traditional manual and paper-based processes. For example, in the IT department, handling a standard request for system access from an employee involves a number of steps and interaction with several different users, including a manager to approve the request. Traditionally, this request was handled orally or via email, making it difficult to track and manage. A request and approval management system streamlines this type of process, and provides IT with a way of managing the system access requests efficiently and effectively.

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