Should a BPM be a Subset of ECM?

When we evaluate most of the Content Management implementations it involves some kind of a Business Process Management requirement. So the big question is why then the vendor positioned their BPM solution as a subset of ECM?

In my opinion BPMS should not be a subset of an ECM.reason beign the ECM systems offer wide range of functionality such as Content (Document) indexing, Content Storage, Content Retrieval, Content Publishing (as part of Web Content Management), Content Personalization, Version Control, Check-in / Check-out, Annotation, Workflow, etc.and most of the ECM product in the market provides a workflow which overlap with BPM systems as they address one element of BPM, providing for the definition and flow of operations performed by people. Workflow systems:

• Are designed for groupware and human collaboration applications.
• Do not integrate operations to be performed by software systems.
• Typically are based on client-server architectures (rather than Web-based thin client architectures)
• Limit operations to those performed inside the enterprise.
• Do not allow business rules to be aggregated with business operations

A BPM is an aggregation of operations performed by people and software systems containing the information used in the process, along with the applicable business rules.
Basically if the requirements more document centric, you can use your ECM products. However, if your requirements are more process or integration centric, I do not think that the current crop of ECM products will satisfy your needs.

Most ECM products actually have good workflow capabilities. If ECM products are used for such business process requirements, there is only limited functionality that they can achieve. Quite a few of these vendors are building BPM capabilities but I think it would be quite sometime before they can claim to be providing full fledged BPM capabilities. Emergence of product such as ULTIMUS is giving a boost to the current BPM trend.