A closer look at where BPM and ECM collide

Nuxeo, IBM and EMC have all recently revamped products with a greater focus on case management, demonstrating a trend where vendors layer business process management on top of content services.

BPM and enterprise content management are certainly complimentary strategies, but to what degree are BPM and ECM merging? For many enterprises, it seems that ECM and BPM have been understood as one in the same--even if they have separate service providers.

"In any business that uses BPM in critical applications, BPM is already integrated with ECM," wrote Phil Ayers, of SaaS provider and consultancy, Consected, in his Improving It blog.  

"You may find very few business processes where content is not involved with business activities and not playing a role in business decision making, though it is a different question all together how this content is authored, stored and managed," observed Enterprise Architect Palash Ghosh in a recent CMS Wire guest commentary.

Vendors are now tailoring offerings to something that many enterprises have been working to customize on their own for some time.  

"I think it unlikely that we'll see anyone but IBM and maybe EMC really producing a credible E-BP-CM suite," said Ayers.

Adam Deane, a London-based technical lead for a BPM vendor agreed that BPM and ECM are on a "collision course." But he also argued that it would be in the industry's and customers' best interests to keep BPM and ECM separate.

In his declaration of war on ECM, he suggested BPM can be preserved through some good PR--namely, calling the practice "ACM" (adaptive case management) rather than ECM. He also said, "BPM vendors will probably embed loosely coupled ECM/EDMS products into their solutions."

Ghosh, however, warned that storing content in a BPM tool may be a bad idea. "It would not be a good idea to store/retrieve content in or from the BPM tool itself if the organization is already running an Enterprise CMS," wrote Ghosh. "While BPM will be used for orchestration to enable a business process using fine grained rules with integration capabilities and human tasks, the ECM solution will be the content and content related service provider for the BPM process."

What's your take on the trajectories of  BPM and ECM? Will the two collide? Should they? Please join the discussion in the comment section below.

For more:
- see Phil Ayers' post at Improving It
- see Adam Deane's blog post
- see the CMS Wire commentary from Palash Ghosh

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