Doug Miles, Director of Market Intelligence for AIIM, comments, “The survey shows a wide range of processes to which BPM has been successfully applied. Accounts payable is a popular application, scanning incoming invoices and matching them in the finance system. The survey also showed good results in customer support, proposal generation and a number of HR processes. The biggest technical issue restricting growth is integration with other enterprise systems, although increasing use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can make this much easier. We also found that most organisations don’t fully understand their current processes - or cannot agree what they are. This makes mapping and optimising difficult.”

BPM has mixed origins in scanned document workflow and enterprise application integration. As a result, IT departments are likely to initiate BPM projects in a third of companies, whereas Line of Business managers take the lead in the next third. The survey found that identification of an end-to-end process owner is one of the most important aspects of successful project management.

Organisations are most likely to source Business Process Management modules from their document management or ECM suite provider, but others use dedicated BPM suites and best-of-breed toolsets, or the BPM functions within their enterprise applications. According to the survey, net investment in BPM, particularly BPM services and consultancy, is set to increase in the next 12 months compared to the last 12 months.

Based on over 450 responses, the AIIM research report is entitled “Business Process Management – are we making the most of content-driven processes?” Part of the AIIM Industry Watch series, the full report is free to download from the AIIM website. It is underwritten by EMC Corporation and IBM.

About the research
The survey was taken by 495 individual members of the AIIM community between October 8th and October 23rd, 2009, using a Web-based tool. Invitations to take the survey were sent via e-mail to a selection of the AIIM worldwide community members.

About AIIM
AIIM is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organisations find, control, and optimise their information. For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organisation focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. The AIIM community includes over 65,000 ECM users and professionals.

About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organisations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information.
www.EMC.com

About IBM
As a market leader in content, process and compliance software, IBM ECM delivers a broad set of mission-critical solutions that help solve today’s most difficult business challenges: managing unstructured content, optimising business processes and helping satisfy complex compliance requirements through an integrated information infrastructure. More than 13,000 global companies, organisations and governments rely on IBM ECM to improve performance and remain competitive through innovation.
www.ibm.com/software/data/ecm