Salesforce’s Service Cloud 3 Blurs Line Between CRM, BPM

Plenty of smart people have tried to come up with a definition for adaptive case management. (The methodology is also sometimes called dynamic case management.) One thing that seems clear is that it will never fit neatly into any single enterprise software category.

While it’s most often mentioned in the same breath with business process management and/or enterprise content management, industry observers agree that it will encompass other software categories as well. When I interviewed Forrester Research analysts Connie Moore and Craig Le Clair about case management last spring, Le Clair told me: “The providers in the market, largely BPM/ECM vendors, are starting to converge some of their technologies into more of a case framework. It’s a combination of ECM, BPM, analytics and social that will form that next-generation case management platform.”

om Shepherd, director of case management for software provider Global 360, Inc. left a comment predicting, in part, “we’ll see solutions for CM from vendors that span many different technology stacks including ECM, BPM, CRM and more.”

Alan Trefler, CEO of Pegasystems, a vendor Moore mentioned in our interview as producing solutions that deal with both structured and unstructured business processes, mentioned the confusion over categorization in a blog post a month or so ago.

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