November 2000

Words From The Editor:

Eying Content as Legal Record

All the big guns are downplaying the "d" word lately and supplanting it with the "c" word. IBM is doing it, FileNet is doing it . . . even Documentum is downplaying "document" and repositioning itself as a "content management" player. Will this term stick, or is it another in the long line of information management terms de jour?

Name changes are getting to be a biannual exercise in global search-and-replace for the people who put together technology marketing literature. In the early 1990s the cutting edge term was "document imaging," but this soon gave way to "document management." By the mid-'90s, the latest products became "integrated document management" systems (or "EDMS," for those lovers of important-sounding acronyms). By the end of the '90s, we were all contemplating "knowledge management," but this term became so bastardized - applied to everything from search engines to scanners - that it lost credibility before it ever became understandable.

The term "content management" is a much clearer proposition than knowledge management, but it, too, needs better definition. Some former document management vendors are using the term to describe what is really compound document management. They have yet to harness XML to break down objects into components such as headlines, paragraphs and graphics so they can be "repurposed" for any media.

In contrast, some Web-oriented content management players pretend they have never heard the word "document." They focus almost exclusively, if not entirely, on delivering information to Web sites and, in some cases, wireless devices. There is even some blurring within this set, with some people thinking of Cold Fusion and others thinking of the likes of Broadvision, Interwoven and Vignette.

Dr. Armando Garcia, vice president of content management solutions at IBM, acknowledges the confusion. "What most people think you mean when you say 'content management' is 'Web content management,'" Garcia recently told me as he laid out IBM's embrace of what is expected to be a $10 billion market. "Our definition is much broader, but the Web is a crucial piece as companies move toward e-business."

IBM is pushing ahead on a wide front, handling Web content on big-league sites, rich media content at ad agencies such as McCann-Erickson and even video content at media giants such as CBS.

"Text documents, graphics, photos, audio clips, video . . . they're all blobs that need to be managed," Garcia observed.

I don't expect "blob management" to be the next phrase in our lexicon, but I do start thinking when I see headlines such as "Internal Documents Reveal Firestone Knew of Tire Problems." Will the headlines 10 years from now reveal damning "Internal Company Content"? Will corporations of the future publish everything online, placing sensitive internal reports on secure intranets?

The recently signed e-signature bill promises that more and more transactions will take place and be tracked purely online. And as we witnessed throughout the Microsoft trial, email is yet another new source of corporate records (see "Lost in Email? Five Archive Solutions").

My bet is that diversity will reign. Text documents, email, Web content, Web transactions, wireless messages, audio and video will be managed side by side. Whether you think of all of these as documents or take the term to mean text on paper, the document model - predating Moses' tablets - will clearly survive into the next millenium.

—Doug Henschen, Editor-in-Chief