Don’t be Content with Just Content

It is pretty easy to settle for the short term and what appears to be a good deal. Today you can find content-focused vendors that will just throw in some free software when you buy their hardware. Then there are those that will sell you content management software without the hardware, but will claim a strong BPM story. They will tell you that they have true content enabled BPM, but “buyer beware.”

It’s easy to justify this to the purchasing types and the accounting dudes, but there is a “devil in the detail” when one is headed towards differentiating business process (the foundation of the future).

The devil of “one sourcing content” is prevalent in these approaches in that these vendors only work with their proprietary content formats. A good content provider would allow for the integration of multiple content streams regardless of the content source/vendor.

This is what I call content integration and some of the large vendors can’t even integrate their own multiple offerings, much less another vendor’s content. If you have multiple content sources or can leverage SharePoint at the low end, you will be disappointed with your purchase in the long run.

There is also the devil of “limited process patterns.” Most of these giant vendors support only “light weight” workflow, but do not support strong human interaction. In addition, few can easily provide straight through processing process patterns along with human-to-human BPM without a large scale and expensive service contract. Few support collaborative processes as well. If your processes are a combination of process styles, you are headed towards disappointment. (See Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently)

Leverage Content with Process:

Content is just data that is static by nature and can be more interesting with embedded meaning and recognitions, but content truly becomes kinetic and potent when combined with rich processing options. This is particularly true when you combine content with collaborative case management and rules. Process adds the innovation needed to accelerate benefits. An example would be mobile building inspections with immediate results posted to a shared content site.

Leverage Content with Collaboration:

Some BPM vendors support more collaboration during the process execution phase to allow knowledge workers to tap each others knowledge. This requires a different kind of process that supports process snippets and includes workers outside the native environment. Good collaborative BPM supports and captures discussions around work in progress, goals, targets, policies, rules and deadlines while accessing knowledge nets, shared work lists, shared calendars and shared case information, including unstructured information/content. An example would be the handling of complex medical requirements in life insurance underwriting where multiple medical professionals might have to collaborate on a decision to underwrite a policy within standard risk parameters.

Leverage Content with Rules:

It is well known that combining rules with process can deliver business agility that is unprecedented (see What’s the Big Deal about Agility in BPM? ). Few organizations have combined micro content with rules and can be short sighted when dealing with content. For some surprising results, consider the idea of creating dynamic content based on rules, late-bound data and constraining policies. An example would be creating customized legal contracts around products and services thus by-passing the legal department log jam.

Bottom Line:

It’s pretty easy to take the easy way out by picking a power vendor that flashes the BPM term. The sharp organizations are asking the tough questions about “What type of BPM am I getting here?” What kind of differentiating process and products can be put together with agile process-driven kinetic content. Perceptive managers are asking about limits of the content vendors or any other independent BPM vendor.