The world of BPM is exciting! Managing the Business Processes throughout your organization brings many challenges. Technology can be very helpful as long as we see the right things through all these buzz words and hypes. The ultimate combination of information- and business process management is reached by combining BPM and ECM in a smart way.
A while a go I wrote an article about this (in Dutch), stating that organizations with complex administrative processes need a common platform for working together: a platform which leads to information management and business process management. Received information always lead to business processes, which again lead to information (output). Managing both business processes and information asks for management of two lifecycles: the business process lifecycle and the information (content) lifecycle. The image below displays these lifecycles, BPM in green- and ECM in blue:
- The BPM lifecycle covers stategy, design, analysis, implementing, execution, monitoring and adapting continuosly;
- The ECM lifecycle covers creating, editing, publishing, translating, archiving and deletion of content (continiously).
So whats next?
The fields of BPM and ECM are melting together. BPMS vendors are moving towards loosely coupled business processes just like ECM vendors doing this already with loosely coupled content. ECMS vendors on the other hand, are expanding their loosely coupled content-functionalities with functionality that supports business process management. Where are we headin’ ? Towards exciting new functionalities to be found in loosely coupled networks, combining ECM and BPM functionalities to the extreme. In a next post, I’ll dive into Human Interaction Management and corporate social networking. Until then, take a look here 
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