Workflow Blog

I have just had a quick look at http://www.google.com/trends and thought I would share the results and my analysis.

First I typed in: workflow

It seems the volume is down from 2004 but more than 2005

The top 5 normalized countries are:

India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa

Next I typed in: workflows

This was not tracked in 2004.  2005 and 2006 have approximately the same number of searches.

The top 5 normalized countries are:

India, Australia, Austria, Germany, United States

Next I typed in: Business Process Management

This was not tracked in 2004.  2005 and 2006 have approximately the same number of searches.

The top 5 normalized countries are:

India, Pakistan, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore

For all searches new reference volumn increased year on year.

So what does this mean.  Well at this point I can only speculate.  One thing seems to be that a high percentage of people in India are searching for workflow/BPM the other is that in different countries some tend to use the word workflow more often then they use the words BPM and vice versa. 

For those of you who don't know I live in Australia.  As such the trends in Australia with respect to workflow and BPM are behind parts of the world and ahead of other parts of the world.  In this little post I will be discussing the workflow trends I am seeing from here in Australia and this may not reflect other places.

First from what I can tell more and more businesses are adopting workflow although government is still a little behind.  I think that in Australia we are still at the early adopter phase.  As for its growth it is a bit hard to tell.  I can look at our websites and say that we increase on average by 10% a month but this doesn't mean that the demand is growing by 10% a month (although that would be nice). 

Another aspect is that smaller companies are realizing that workflow is becoming more of an issue.

Finally the reasons for purchase are a little different.  It used to be all about cost savings, and while the is still a large part of it the trend is more towards risk mitigation.  Even on the other side of the world Enron has made waves.  Increased regulations and reporting now seem to be major reasons for investing in workflow.