Neil Miller has written a great post entitled “My 10-Point BPM System Wishlist". If you have a few minutes, go and read it now. I strongly agree with pretty much every word.

I frequently declare that the soft components (e.g the team and the approach) are more important than the choice of technology / BPMS but I can’t dispute that I’m usually happiest at work when I’m flowing downstream with the BPMS.

I’d like to add an item to the list...

I want seamless, complete and transparent integration with whatever source control, deployment and testing components I have chosen to use. I would very much like, before I retire (so we have a few years to get there), to work for an organisation that routinely deploys atomic features into production on their BPMS.

There is a mild irony to the fact that the operational processes around many BPMS leave much room for improvement. More often than not (in my circles at least) there are low value, error prone, easily automated but still manual activities in the SDLC processes.