Business processs management keeps things flowing

Business process management (BPM) is a hot topic this year at AIIM and continues to be a growth market. BPM helps move work through a logical process from worker to worker sometimes in a serial fashion and sometimes to multiple places in a parallel process, depending on the complexity of the flow. Any writing process involves a flow from idea, to draft, to final version, to published version to the content management. Some industries, such as insurance, have a logical set of procedures for processing forms. It may need to be scanned if it's a paper form. It may travel from scanning to underwriting, then other review checkpoints before it gets to accounts payable for a payment.

At the same time, from the moment the document is scanned, it enters the document lifecyle workflow. It will eventually be archived and after a certain time interval possibly disposed of. These processes involve a document or content management system (as well as other business systems) and the work flow has to work within the system and also communicate with other systems.

This is a big growth area right now in content management, so as you make your rounds at AIIM ask vendors about how to take advantage of workflow to automate some of the processes you may be doing manually now. In today's economy it's more crucial than ever that you find ways to work more efficiently and BPM has the potential to help you do that. Note that there is a BPM workshop track and you can check out those presentations to learn more first hand from industry experts.