Ten years ago, Computer Sciences Corporation's James Champy co-authored the New York Times best seller, Reengineering the Corporation, that set the world alight with 2,300,000 copies in print. But that was last decade. Ten years on, Computer Sciences Corporation's Howard Smith, has co-authored the book that reinvents reengineering and sets the business agenda for the decade ahead.

Don't bridge the business-IT divide: Obliterate it! This book provides the first authoritative analysis of how Business Process Management (BPM) changes everything in business and what it portends. While the vision of process management is not new, existing reengineering theories and systems have not been able to cope with the reality of business processes—until now. In this book, Smith and internationally acclaimed co-author, Peter Fingar, herald a breakthrough in process thinking and technologies that utterly transforms today's information systems and reduces the lag between management intent and execution. How important is this to business? Here's a line from GE's current annual report: "[process] digitization represents a revolution that may be the greatest opportunity for growth that our company has ever seen."

By placing business processes on center stage, corporations can gain the capabilities they need to innovate, reenergize performance and deliver the value today’s markets demand. A process-managed enterprise makes agile course corrections, embeds six sigma quality and reduces cumulative costs across the value chain. It pursues strategic initiatives with confidence, including mergers, consolidation, alliances, acquisitions, outsourcing and global expansion. Process management is the only way to achieve these objectives with transparency, management control and accountability.

During the reengineering wave of the 1990s, management prophets' books full of stories about other companies were all you had to guide the transformation of your business. Although their underlying theories were based on age-old common sense and general systems theory proposed fifty years earlier, they offered no path to execution. By contrast, the process-managed enterprise grasps control of internal processes and communicates with a universal process language that enables partners to execute on shared vision – to understand each other’s operations in detail, jointly design processes and manage the entire lifecycle of their business improvement initiatives.

Process management is not another form of automation, a new killer-app or a fashionable new management theory. Process management discovers what you do and then manages the lifecycle of improvement and optimization, in a way that translates directly to operation. Whether you wish to adopt industry best practices for efficiency or pursue competitive differentiation, you will need process management. Based on a solid mathematical foundation, the BPM breakthrough is for business people. Designed top down in accordance with a company’s strategy, business processes can now be unhindered by the constraints of existing IT systems.

You will find this brave new world inside the pages of Business Process Management: The Third Wave. Short on stories and long on insight and practical information, this book will help you write your own story of success. The book provides the first authoritative analysis of how BPM changes everything in business - and what it portends. Welcome to the company of the future, the fully digitized corporation, the process-managed enterprise. Welcome to the next fifty years of IT.

HOWARD SMITH is Chief Technology Officer (Europe) of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and co-chair of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org). With more than 24 years in the IT industry, he is a sought after speaker and advisor. His work in predicting and shaping technology at the intersection with business led him to take an active role in the development and application of the third wave. He is currently researching the application of business process management to corporate sustainability, innovation and growth, for which he has global research and development responsibility at CSC. Howard can be contacted at hsmith23@csc.com

PETER FINGAR is an Executive Partner with the digital strategy firm, the Greystone Group. He delivers keynotes world wide and is author of the best-selling books, The Death of "e" and the Birth of the Real New

Economy and Enterprise E-Commerce. Over his 30-year career he has taught graduate and undergraduate computing studies and held management, technical and consulting positions with GTE Data Services, Saudi Aramco, the Technical Resource Connection division of Perot Systems and IBM Global Services, as well as serving as CIO for the University of Tampa. Peter can be contacted at pfingar@acm.org