ORLANDO, Fla.-- As with previous Gartner Symposium ITxpos, there's always a unifying theme, a conceptual framework aimed at galvanizing, but sometimes contorting, the thinking of the attendees. A year ago the event focused on the real-time enterprise (RTE)--a theme that is still omnipresent in the event's breakout sessions and analyst vocabulary. This year, RTE--which postulates that what you don't know can and will hurt you--has been subjugated to the main theme of the conference: business process fusion.

Gartner analyst Simon Hayward defines business process fusion as enabling "transformational change in business capabilities by coherent IT support for dynamic, time-sensitive, end-to-end business processes. It requires modular and integratable application functionality and IT infrastructure, with explicit process management capabilities encompassing transactional, analytical and collaborative styles of processing."

If the above description seems somewhat cryptic, how about this one: "By building on the maturing capabilities of system integration and system access technologies, business process fusion supports the creation of new processes that increase the speed and flow of information to enable planning, optimization, simulation and other performance management activities on a broad scale. The result is IT that offers value by extending business capabilities, not merely by automating what already exists."

Distilling the definition even further, Hayward describes business process fusion as "the transformation of business activities that is achieved by integrating previously autonomous business processes to create a new scope of management."

The definitions sound like they could have been generated by Doc Searls' TechnoLatin phrase generator, BuzzPhrase. A simpler definition might be the art of marrying distinctly different business processes in a way that produces competitive advantage.

Rather than try to define the concept with more words, an example of business process fusion would suffice. Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer cited a case in which the airline JetBlue dynamically set the price of the next seat sold on a particular flight based on data about the last seats sold. According to Plummer, "Most companies manage their pricing in one place and their inventories in another. Great advantages can be had from fusing the two together."

Now we are getting closer to clarity. JetBlue's goal was dynamic pricing to optimize the revenue per seat, and the method was monitoring and linking data from distinct business processes to get a competitive edge. Here's another concrete illustration of the idea. According to Joe Marengi, general manager of Dell's Americas operations, Dell and its customers benefit from matching intelligence on parts availability in the supply chain to the various customer-facing sales channels. "Take flat panel displays," Marengi said. "If our intelligence tells us that there's good availability on 15-inchers at the same time that there are supply constraints on the 17-inchers, we'll push the 15-inchers and we'll adjust the pricing to make it worth the while of the customers that originally wanted 17-inchers. Knowing something about availability is a key advantage of ours."

The seeds from which business process fusion grows are not a new, but have been freshly minted by Gartner as a trend with a roadmap. How does an enterprise achieve business process fusion enlightenment?

According to Hayward, business process fusion is achievable if enterprises have invested in creating the network infrastructure to capture core transactional data and software platforms that span traditional application silos.

However, he cautions that business process fusion is an aspiration rather than a current reality, and predicts that it won't become a key driver for IT investment until 2007.

Hayward envisions a new discipline of enterprisewide process management, encompassing business process management (BPM)and business activity monitoring (BAM) as well as software architecture that breaks down silos (such as transactions, analytics, data store and messaging) that lock information and interdependent business processes out of an integrated end-to-end framework.

As you might expect, business process fusion depends on the growth of a service-oriented architecture and Web services, using self-describing data standards and methods and metadata models for crafting new, composite applications that accommodate process changes.

Many pieces have to fall in place for business process fusion to become a reality beyond instances like JetBlue's dynamic pricing application: Development tools that map and model business process; business process-focused Web services standards; new pricing models for IT products and services; a radical change in how to think about IT; and money to invest in transforming IT.

From the description, business process fusion places business processes--not data or applications--at the head of the table. A matrix of business processes becomes the knobs and dials that businesses use to optimize their use of IT to meet their goals. All the software and hardware components supporting business processes across an extended enterprise dance to those controls.

For now business process fusion is more of description of what IT could be in a future world governed by Web services and service-oriented business applications (SOBA). In fact, it's more business process confusion than fusion at this point.

You can bet that you'll be hearing a lot more about fusion from Gartner and vendors like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and others in the coming years. Their hope is to fuse their business to your business processes. As you go down the fusion road, be sure to stay in control of your business processes.

You can write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.