Comments on: Should BPM be a part of ECM?

By: Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:08:44 +0000

Outstanding Questions on Enterprise Content Manage…

Awhile back I asked a ton of questions regarding Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and was reminded of an interaction I had with John Newton at OSBC last year based on a comment on Alfresco by Alan Pelz-Sharpe and figured it would be a good opportu…..

By: Kaushik Sethuraman

Kaushik Sethuraman — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:56:15 +0000

From what i’ve seen, BPM suites exist primarily to improve processes. . From that standpoint, it must:
1. Make it easy to help improve a process – either understand a process and provide opportunity for its improvement.
2. Make it easy to visualize which parts of the process add value

Implementing this will require a variety of technologies – ECM, Workflow Engines, Document Formats, Standarized System Interfaces, Security, Publishing, Document Acquisition etc.

IMHO that’s the difference, definitely a big difference. Most times, it is the SIs and Consulting firms that love the chaos – BPM, BAM, etc.

By: Apoorv

Apoorv — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 07:22:29 +0000

Punit,
Thanks for the comment. I agree that there is a convergence of technologies as you’ve mentioned and we are already seeing APS (application platform suites) emerging with such features.

However, my point was that should BPM, as a concept, be a part of ECM? Many a times, BPM is much more than content and workflow.

By: Punit Pandey

Punit Pandey — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:04:38 +0000

Apoorv,

It is not convergence of ECM and BPM but it is convergence of enterprise technologies. Soon we will see ECM, BPM, Portals, Security, BI etc. in one suite.

– Punit

By: Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen

Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:30:11 +0000

Generally speaking, I would call BPs part of transactional content (I might have read that here). So it would be natural to handle it somewhat in a CMS (even more so if the vendor claims to provide ECM). I guess the real hassle begins when integrating stand-alone CM with the up-gobbled BPM systems. Integration means standards must be used. I can guess where this is heading: BPM->BPEL->WS->SOA -> Service Oriented Content Management, anyone?

By: Boris Kraft

Boris Kraft — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 08:49:09 +0000

One of the core ideas behind Magnolia 3.0′s [1] integration of openWFE [2] is exactly that – making Magnolia part of a potential enterprise wide process management system. This allows to create content as part of a wider process, possibly involving completely different systems and technologies (openWFE is the only open-source distributed cross-platform BPM I know of and includes options to talk to it via REST, .net, Java, perl, ruby and python (I probably missed a couple).

Once you start looking at the processes that go on behind the scenes for e.g. a e-commerce based community platform including registrations to events (and creating the events in the first place) the power – and necessity – to provide these options becomes obvious.

[1] http://www.magnolia.info
[2] http://www.openwfe.org

By: alan pelz-sharpe

alan pelz-sharpe — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:34:40 +0000

Great post! And a very interesting topic.

When I joined Ovum as an analyst in 1999 I was employed to cover Document Management & Workflow. The two things went hand in hand, and without workflow you have little more than a repository.

To me there are two questions here – though I agree that BPM is more than workflow, do buyers understand that? I don’t think most do.

Similarly just how complex does workflow or BPM need to be ? – though tools like Staffware, that can manage highly complex parallel processes etc have been around for years, they are still a minority in the market.

I think an ECM tool is not an ECM tool without some powerful workflow – does it require full blown BPM? Probably not. But the the biggest problem of all in my experience is actually plotting and maintaining business processes in the first place.

In other words, the tools are often more than capable of managing the clients needs. But unless we are talking of a one off simple approval route, then they are virtually unusable in the long term due to the difficulty in actually plotting and maintaining the flows – design tools such as Visio are inadequate, and tools such as Prof Scheers Aris are too complicated etc..