jBPM

As technology continues to evolve, new technology based trends come to help improve organization's performance. That was the case of email and human resources software. Computer managed workflow is one such trend and it's acquiring a large popularity among CIOs (Chieff Information Officers) because it makes organizations more controllable and easy to optimize, it also helps reduce the learning curve of new employees and it helps keeping track of processess and procedures within the organization. BPM (Bussiness Process Management) can be seen as a novel technique to manage organizations. It is based upon the definition of Processes in terms of their goals, risks, procedures and indicators, rather than the simple timeline or gantt diagrams so popular in management nowadays. In this sense, it is a lot closer to the organization Mission. Work flow and Process Management integrate in BPM and now CEOs have a totally new dominion of tools to receive feed back of the whole organization performance. With BPM CEOs have faster resources to identify improvement opportunities and risks and control them. As a CEO, you are interested in look at your business processes and identify performance in each step.
Lets assume you are a CEO and your company has a workflow for mass production of certain product. If you are using BPM, you should have already defined the procedure that guides production. In fact you should have a computarized workflow diagram that tells you how many request are held in each stage of the flow and how many employees are working in each stage. You can, for instance, detect that there is a branch in the flow in which there are 3 employees attanding 30 requests, when another branch has 4 employees attanding just 20 requests. As you're able to dettect this in real time, you can redefine roles inside the flow in such a way that you optimize production. In this example, you could have changed one employee of branch 2 to help attand branch 1.

JBPM (http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm) is a free software project that implements the idea of BPM on a web environment. If you are a serious CEO, and want to optimize your organization's workflow, you should seriously consider JBPM. As it works on a server, you don't have much trouble with TCO. You can also grow horizontally as you please to gain availavility without paying increasingly high rates of lisencing. It will help you potentiate and optimize your organization with incredibly low costs.

Another project that is evolving towards BPM is Orfeo (www.orfeogpl.org). It has been tested in plenty of public organizations with relatively high success rates. It aproaches BPM from the document flow perspective, but it clearly goes
that way.