Business Process Management: What It Is, What Its Implementation Problems Are

By David Roe (@druadh20) Aug 1, 2011

In light of the recent acquisition of BPM vendor Global 360 by OpenText, the question of the relationship between enterprise content management (ECM) and integrated business process management (BPM) software is, once again, in the spotlight.

If ECM and BPM are two distinct set of software tools, outside of IT departments, there appears to be some confusion as to what to expect from either, with some businesses looking to enterprise content management to solve issues where they really should be looking at business process management.

While enterprise CMS aims to manage the content across the enterprise — and most enterprises understand that — many are less clear on what BPM does, or, more important, what it should do. At the core of this is a misunderstanding of what business process management is. So in light of that, we decided to have a look at what it is and what approach businesses should take to it.

Recent Integrations

In fairness, the confusion is understandable, given the number of vendors that are now looking to integrate BPM into their principal ECM packages.

OpenText (news, site), for example, after the acquisitions of Metastorm and Global 360. has said that, while integrating the respective BPM packages into ECM Suite 2010 will be a challenge, this is the next step in its strategy for these products.

In December last year, Alfresco entered the BPM fray, and unveiled in April this year its first preview of the Activiti Business Process Management workflow engine integrated with Alfresco (news, site).

Laserfiche’s (news, site) Rio combines ECM functionality with business process management security and auditing tools.

To distinguish the two, then, it is important to understand what business process management actually is and what it might do for your enterprise.

BPM Definitions

The two have become so intertwined that AIIM (news, site) now offers a certificate program in Business Process Management. In the introduction to the course, AIIM sets out its concept of business process management as follows:

BPM is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into your organization. Discover, document, automate and continuously improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs."

Clearly there are a number of different items here, but worth noting is that, while software and technology are a core element, it also indicates that business process management is not exclusively about that.

Rather it offers data and content visibility across the enterprise. It is as much a way of looking at that content, or data, and creating processes across the enterprise that offers the most efficient way of using that content to create a more efficient and cost-effective organization.