The deep and delicate art of ECM

So, the four major, most successful categories of content management, having been founded on various principles, exhibit a great deal of overlap, especially in their infrastructure, and a great many gaps, especially in their readiness to suit specific, yet universal business needs. For instance, our customers are consistently surprised when ECM vendors don’t directly address product information management (PIM) or technical documentation management, and when they do, it’s only to provide repository level services, which any database could do.

Competitive factors

The overriding reason for ECM’s resistance to PIM and technical documentation, as well as other gaps in the platforms, is the constant pressure over the last 15 years or so for ECM vendors to distinguish themselves from powerful enterprise database vendors. Thus, they’ve continually asserted their expertise in managing growing masses of unstructured information.

But just as those database vendors are resolutely entering the content management space, the structured vs. unstructured argument is becoming moot. At the information management level, content management is largely an effort to bring structure to what was unstructured, so it can be easily searched for, analyzed, automated, audited, reused, associated with business records and delivered to the right audience. To support emerging needs, ECM platforms have to recognize that structured and unstructured exist on a continuum, and technology mechanisms like XML, metadata, search and even forms are already conspiring to permeate that outdated structured/ unstructured wall.

Next-generation CM

Enterprise content management is more art than science. At its highest level, it is what enables companies to communicate and collaborate with their many human constituencies. At an information management level, IT departments have to manage the growing mass and expanding variety of content at an appropriate level of granularity, allowing them to assert control when necessary or worthwhile, or to offer freedom and flexibility when not. That means that sometimes the systems will have to manage containers, and sometimes they’ll have to handle documents, paragraphs, sentences, clauses and even individual words. Sometimes they’ll handle text, sometimes graphics and voice, sometimes video and sometimes all of the above. Most importantly, they’ll have to manage the transition and transformation of content from one mode to another.

The critical business problems and initiatives that call for content management require an even more expansive accommodation for information, spanning everywhere from highly explicit data in enterprise systems to the tacit knowledge in people’s heads. The most successful companies in the world will use the art of content management to benefit from the skills, experience and expertise of their people: their employees, executives, partners, customers and consumers.

All this explains the resistance to complete consolidation in the content management market. It also explains why content management isn’t and won’t ever be generic and commoditized. Yet, while companies can’t expect a single vendor to do everything, they can effectively establish a framework that governs their content management investments and aligns them with enterprise business goals and initiatives.