Tearing Down the Walls between Process and Information
Transactional Content Management: Fitting the Pieces Together
The intersection of ECM and BPM is called transactional content management (TCM), and its goal is to enable a new level of contextual awareness and optimization to the management and orchestration of processes. One of the goals that most organizations have for implementing BPM is to improve employee productivity, but this can only be partially achieved without looking at the organization’s information management requirements. Increasing productivity requires reducing process complexity and enabling collaboration among process participants—one very effective way of achieving both requirements is by automatically providing information directly within process activities, so that it can be accessed and shared without searching through disparate applications, emails, file systems and paper files. TCM allows the full range of structured and unstructured information types to be incorporated directly into process activities, creating a complete view of both the action required and the information needed to make decisions.
At the same time, TCM provides full protection of information through a secure repository with defined information access rights for each participant in the process. Looking at the employee hiring process again, different people involved in the process will need to be able to see different pieces of information related to the applicant; for instance, it may be that only HR is allowed to see the results of a drug test. While a virtual file can be created to bundle all the information for each individual applicant, different access rights can be assigned for each piece of information. In this way, organizations can ensure that they are complying with both internal policies and external regulations relating to information protection and privacy.
Over the last several years, both ECM and BPM vendors have been adding capabilities to their products addressing the need for both information and process management, and offering products that attack the requirements for an overall solution from different angles. A true TCM solution, however, provides a fully integrated set of technologies, with comprehensive capabilities to model, analyze, orchestrate, monitor and optimize both the process and the associated information that supports the process. In this way, incoming and existing information can be delivered directly to relevant process activities, while, at the same time, information can undergo its own lifecycle transitions based on what is happening in the process (e.g., making a legal document an official record after it has been reviewed, or converting a Word document to a non-editable PDF file after it has been submitted). TCM also provides the ability to easily integrate with other systems, applications and data sources, using a service-oriented approach to leverage other information assets and guide process interactions with disparate systems both inside and external to the organization.
Process improvement initiatives must take a holistic approach when looking at the organization’s needs for enhanced operational efficiency and employee productivity. TCM provides a comprehensive solution for managing processes and information, bridging the gap which most standalone BPM and ECM products have in their ability to reduce complexity, ensure compliance, enable agility and optimize how organizations operate.
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s transactional content management solution can be found at
www.emc.com/tcm