Laserfiche Extends ECM into the Realm of BPM

Top Resolutions for IT Teams in 2016

In a lot of organizations, most of the work done by employees versus machines revolves around an enterprise content management (ECM) system that becomes the central hub for a wide variety of workflow processes. With that IT reality in mind, Laserfiche this week released an update to its namesake ECM software that includes a wide range of business process templates as well as operational analytics to monitor those processes.

Thomas Phelps, vice president of corporate strategy and marketing for Laserfiche, says rather than requiring organizations to acquire separate business process management (BPM) applications, the goal is to provide templates that those organizations can use to easily extend the value of the investments already made in ECM.

Unveiled at the Laserfiche Empower 2016 conference this week, Phelps says that the business reality most IT organizations need to acknowledge is that most of the data that drives a workflow process sits inside an ECM. Rather than moving data between the ECM and a third-party BPM application, it makes more sense to layer BPM templates on top of the ECM platform to create those applications.

While this approach may not replace the need for every BPM application, Phelps notes that the templates that Laserfiche is developing will cover a broad range of application scenarios and add minimal cost to the total cost of IT inside any organization.

There’s no doubt these days that IT organizations in general are heavily focused on deriving more business value from existing IT investments. The challenge in accomplishing that goal is not so much robustness of the underlying platform that happens to be in place as much as it is how extensible that platform is in handling new application use cases.