Achieving True Enterprise Content Management Proceed With Caution
Study: ECM and BPM Not Understood
Financial services industry fails to realize technologies' full potential.
A recent survey, conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM International; Silver Spring, Md.) - an industry association focused on promoting the benefits of document, content and business process management - reveals that just half of technology end users surveyed fully understand what ECM stands for, and only 47 percent understand the term BPM. Additionally, respondents see limited connections between ECM and BPM: 71 percent say ECM and BPM are separate initiatives that overlap only from time to time. Enterprise content management technologies capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content; business process management references the definition, execution, management and analysis of all business processes. According to John Mancini, president, AIIM International, ECM technologies aid successful BPM. "You can't really have a BPM initiative without simultaneously addressing the ECM," he says.
Today, the technologies require separate investments, but in the past, their functionalities were often tied together; companies simply used other terms to describe ECM and BPM, explains Mancini. "'Workflow system' is the term that came before BPM, and document management came before ECM," he says. "Back in the earlier stages, those terms were tightly aligned with each other, as opposed to how ECM and BPM are [viewed] now."
The study, which surveyed 500 ECM and BPM technology end users across industries - including 83 financial services and insurance organizations - also identified the obstacles that technology departments face when implementing the solutions. Respondents identified the No. 1 obstacle to deploying both BPM (33 percent) and ECM (30 percent) technologies as planning/managing the implementation.
-Cynthia Ramsaran, Bank Systems & Technology
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