Leonor Ciarlone from the Gilbane Group has a good post on “The ECM and BPM Intersection”. Her comment:
I am positive that this is not a “never the twain shall meet” situation when it comes to content strategies and ECM technologies. Process and content are siblings; it is only a matter of time before many of the isolated technologies that support both will merge in a more tangible manner than simple workflow.
Made me think…The mature ECM suites all have document centric workflow as a core capability. More of the larger ECM vendors are expanding this functionality to include full fledged BPM as defined by the Gartner research report “Business Process Management: Preparing for the Process-Managed Organization” last year.
BPM is a management practice that provides for governance of a process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance. BPM is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes.
I think this intersection is already happening and is being fueled by three things:
- The move to open XML file formats like Open Document Format and the alternative from Microsoft, Open XML File Format
- Web Services being embraced by not only by customers but being supported by the major ECM vendors
- The growing buzz, hype, and popularity around BPM and the fact this BPM market is heating up
The ECM vendors do not want to be left behind and see the “ECM Lite” or core content management services being provided by Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft (oh yeah, and Alfresco for Open Source) being combined with stand alone mature and functionally rich BPM suites to replace the “single belly button” ECM value proposition.
I think the acquisition of ProActivity by EMC can be looked at two ways: First, not really an intersection but maybe EMC Software Division recognized that the current “BPM” capability in Documentum was not up to snuff and needed a boost; or could it be that like Oracle (The Oracle Buying Spree), they see the smaller companies out there with specific technical capabilities and niche set of customers an annoyance as well as opportunity and they find it easy to just gobble them up and remove the unnecessary competition and add another capability to the toolbox.
What do you think?
Russ - Thanks for popping over to my blog, and mentioning Trusted Edge. I’ll have to get in touch with those folks.
Re: this blog post, having been with Delphi Group for 12 years now, I can safely say that the intersection of BPM and ECM is growing daily at this point. We are seeing more and more of a marriage of these components at the infrastructure level (EMC/Documentum/ProActivity as one example), and also as fully integrated applications targeted at specific worlds, such as Anaqua’s Intellectual Property Management solution, which brings lifecycle management (cradle to grave management and collaboration) around IP-specific concerns. Another example, Systemware, out of Dallas, TX area, is a company that most have probably not heard about, but have been around for 25 years, and have what appears to be quite the integrated solution (CM, RM, WF/BPM, Imaging, output management), as a horizontal solution, but also with specific targets for Financial Services and Healthcare.
As long as these offerings are also easily tied into bigger/better/more-expensive (probably) “enterprise systems,” then there is far less danger of a proliferation of silos (aka “the good ol’ days), and a more likely chance (but not certainty), that these just become application instances that happen to sit on top of a healthy information or enterprise architecture.
BTW - keep an eye out for my podcast/interview with John Newton of Alfresco. We cover a good many topics you might enjoy, just need to finish some details on editing down the length before it goes live.
Dan,
Thanks so much for stopping by and shareing your insights. I will look at those you mentioned.
Theses are definetly interesting times.
Russ - Incidentally, transcription and full audio of the interview with John Newton are now available at my blog. Closing the loop and re-pinging.
BTW, have you noticed the feeding frenzy that is IBM these days? They are out acquiring Cisco’s spree from the dot-com days…
Dan,
Good to hear from you.
BTW, I did listen to your interview with John. Nice job and very interesting.
I find what Alfresco is doing to be very interesting and I plan to take a close look at 1.4 when it is released.
And, yes! What the heck is IBM up to? I am not sure.
I wonder if they are just trying to change the software landscape through a scarcity strategy (snapping up so many software companies).
Thanks for the follow up,
russ
Very interesting topic . I think the intersection is happening
While workflow can only be one component of the whole BPM space , I think ECM and BPM are complementary technologies with ECM providing a platform for organizing, storing and managing content and BPM is a framework for defining rules, modeling process, Analytics and activity monitoring .
Hence a combination of ECM tools and a rules driven BPMS can form a complete business process solution and ECM vendors like EMC documentum have implemented this very effectively in their latest versions .
Showing my age probably, but there was a time when these two did converge.
Remember the early days of document management? DM and Workflow were inseparable - in fact my topic area at Ovum when I started there 10 years back was “Document Management and Workflow”.
Not sure why the two areas diverged - I think in part it was due to vendors such as Documentum and PC Doc’s who at the time focused on legal and pharma where the management of the doc was the focus, and neither actually had any workflow capability as such. They overshadowed the work of FileNet, Magellan etc who had been the first in doc centric workflow.
10 years ago theory was - single repository, single source, minimum volume - highly managed. 10 years on the reality is - vast volumes, multiple repositories, countless copies - all largely unmanaged. BPM (aka workflow) has greater appeal???
hi