BPM - Centralized or not?

I attended a panel discussion at BPM in Action virtual conference today. I took the chance to ask whether the panel think BPM will be implemented in an enterprise centralized fashion (orchestrating enterprise services) or as a part of applications.

Kiran Garimella's avatar Dr. Jeffrey Sterllings answered by saying that the future of BPM will be a centralization of process implementations. Traditionally BPM has focused on a cross-functional process level. That means processes integrating applications within different organisational units (such as marketing, sales, finance, etc). But are those cross-functional processes really the most interesting to manage and measure, or is it the processes within a function/application?

For me it feels like a déjà vu, the whole centralization idea. EJB failed big time when trying to be the one and only point of integration to enterprise data. Will the BPMS fail for the same reasons, trying to be the one and only point of integration to enterprise services.

Vendors like PeopleSoft, SAP and other will not stand still watching their applications being disassembled into small services to be orchestrated in a centralized BPMS. They will probably provide BPM support as part of their own applications. And I'm affraid that every custom build application will host their own process implementation with more or less support for BPM. A call centre application would probably implement its own workflow engine, since the whole idea is to manage and measure the sequential activities. Same goes for a CRM and for a lot of other applications in an enterprise.

It will also be interesting to see if other vendors will follow Microsoft and provide a process engine framework for ISVs. Workflow Foundation supports process management and can be hosted in any .NET application.