Enterprise CMS vs Business Process Management: Do You Need One Platform, or Both?

By Ghosh Palash Jun 1, 2011

Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM), while separate technologies, often overlap. As a result, some organizations struggle with understanding whether they need an ECM solution, a BPM solution or both. This article takes a look at the options.

ECM or BPM?

Recently, I came across quite a few interesting posts on Enterprise CMS (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) dematerialization — or ECM & BPM cross-cutting. While some of the leading pure play BPM vendors are claiming that 'they have an ECM container in-built and take care of content management needs', almost all leading ECM vendors also offer a BPM engine and it can take care of an organization's content centric business process/workflow needs. So it is not very difficult for customers to be confused while making their tools/technology decision for managing content and process using one or the other.

I had touched upon some specific area(s) related to this in one of my previous articles Integrating an enterprise CMS with BPM — A strategy for bridging the gap. I also see, I have been quoted in the article Closer look where BPM and ECM collide. I would like to take a stab at detailing my stand on this subject. This is absolutely my independent view point and not to promote or demote any specific kind of product stack and readers have every right to agree or disagree with me.

In general any tool/technology decisions will be driven by some of the following factors:

The business problems the customer want to solve and feature set the customer is looking for.
Current tool/technology stack the customer has already opted and has running for several years on the customer's premises.
Size of the implementation — scaling and other non-functional aspects like integration, ease of use etc.
Standards — the specific implementation the customer wants/needs to adhere to.

Now let us try to examine some business/tools/technology situations that are close to reality and that we often see in customer's premises.

[Editor's note: Also from Palash Ghosh: Enterprise Content Management & Business Process Management in the Cloud]

The Route to Enterprise Content Management

Most of the large organizations (Fortune 500 and so on), are already running their matured Enterprise CMS solution on a pure play ECM product/platform provided by leading ECM vendor (not by BPM vendors). Any organization (including SMB) that is looking for new ECM centric platform or planning to consolidate their old disparate ECM platform to a new ECM platform, I suggest they should look for a pure play ECM solution provided by ECM vendor.

Now why so? The simple reason is that an organization's content management needs do not stop at uploading and versioning documents; rather they start from there. Any standard ECM product will have content management features along with other capabilities like Indexing, Digital Asset Management, compliance, Records Management, robust security, content integration, content collaboration, archive, other non-functional aspects and this list will go on.