Business leaders often decry the traditional boundaries between data, unstructured content, and processes in their enterprises -- and rightly so. Many ECM vendors have been working to add business process capabilities, espectially around simpler, ad-hoc processes. However, the typical content management vendor brings very limited enterprise integration toolsets and shallow visibility into critical data warehouses. So maybe convergence will come from the other direction, as ERP vendors consolidate content management and enterprise-wide business processes. Naeem Hashmi makes a persuative point for this latter alternative, in the current issue of Intelligent Enterprise. The article is a bit of a paean to SAP, but Hashmi joins a growing chorus of consultants in pointing out that business objects and content objects are analytically very similar and ripe for some more creative combination. Of course, all talk of convergence is very speculative, since it usually takes a long time -- often several years -- for corporate mergers or new product development to result in meaningfully-integrated software packages...
Read "ERP and Content Management: Harmonic Convergence?"