Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise through people, systems, and information in order to improve, to optimize the business processes or to adapt them to the changes, facilitating business innovation.

1. Analysis and design - identify the business processes
2. Modeling and execution of the business processes
3. Monitoring and evaluation - tracking and reporting the execution

• IBM Glossary

(could someone read this in German and translate the main message to the others)

• Prof. Dr. Thomas Allweyer : Unterschiedliche Verwendung des Prozessbegriffs (http://www.bpm-guide.de/articles/26)
• Dr. Martin Bartonitz - BPMS, BPML, BPEL, BPMN, WMS, XPDL, …(http://www.bpm-guide.de/articles/17)
• Jakob Freund : Geschäftsprozesse vs. Workflows(http://www.bpm-guide.de/articles/3)