The saying goes, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It comes from carpentry, where it implies a certain amount of limited capability for a craftsman, but it has applicability in a wide range of situations. In particular for the IT industry, it denotes that someone doesn't have all the tools they need to do a job well. Not that the job will not get done, because we all know the jobs get done. But sometimes doing so requires heroic efforts.

At times, it feels like you only have a hammer when it comes to the use, and even awareness, of business process management, or BPM. Why that should be is not clear - perhaps the early tools didn't function well enough, or were hard to integrate.

Whatever the reason, BPM is one of the tools that's often put on the back burner while companies spend time and money doing it by hand. It may be an accounting problem - quantifying the cost of doing it the way it's always been done is sometimes difficult. But that cost can be enormous if you include the cost of lost opportunities caused by the inability to respond to business change in real time.

Think about mortgages for a second. Rates are at an all-time low, but they change quickly, and there's no guarantee that you can take advantage of the rate if you don't act in a timely fashion. Now what would happen if you had to make a code change, run it through QA, and deploy it in order to get that good rate you're hoping for? You know the answer - you'll be paying a lot more for that house.

It's the same with business opportunities. The market doesn't care that you have hard-coded business rules and a complex deployment scheme that takes you six months to move a change into production (don't laugh, this is real for many companies). The market changes when it changes.

That's why a BPM capability is so important. It's not just about the cost of making a programming change and deploying it - that's expensive enough. It's about the cost of all the opportunities missed because the software that you have is not agile enough to actually allow you to react to the market and move with it.

Admittedly, BPM requires a change in the way we think about software - but then again, so does Web services itself, and most of us wouldn't argue that the changes are for the better. It takes a new twist on thinking to start to abstract the business logic out of the code and into a descriptive process language, but it's not so hard to make that twist.

Part of it comes down to knowing what to make a service (something that's coded) and what to make a rule (something that's changeable). BPM experts will talk about managing a service or services using the term "process." Services may be individual steps in a process. You want to be able to define processes in a simple, business-like way that is intuitive to the folks that make business decisions.

Which means that services have to be developed in ways that make sense to business users - in other words, the API has to be understandable and usable to those who aren't programmers. Not that programming is necessarily going to go away - in fact the task of making services intelligible argues for increased programming savvy. What's needed are the super-coders; IT experts who also understand the business logic and can design intelligent APIs for the use of the business, not the IT department.

SOAs and Web services are paving that road for BPM today. Finally, we have a simplified API language (note that I didn't say simple, it isn't) that the right tools can use to allow business analysts to define processes. And we're starting to see tools that allow this definition in a fairly straightforward manner.

Not that it will be as simple as writing an English sentence such as "apply a 10% discount for orders over $100,000," or "include an overseas disclaimer for all orders placed outside the U.S." It's not going to be natural language processing. But it will be on the order of wiring services together instead of having to code them. And that's progress. That's capability, and the ability to see the task as more than just banging a nail into a board with a hammer. Finally, a screwdriver - and a power one at that.