ECM's May-December Romance Evolves

by Bruce Silver

By nearly universal consensus of the content management punditocracy, this year's AIIM show in San Francisco was a yawner. So I dreaded the call I knew would come from Transform's editor, inquiring how I made sense of AIIM and what it said about the current state of content management.

At least, I rationalized, the Twilight Zone weirdness of last year's show had dissipated. AIIM last year, if you recall, tried to create a buzz about a new concept called "enterprise content management (ECM)," but it came off more like a May-December wedding between a graying gentleman named document management and an attractive young woman named Web content management (WCM). Both bride and groom agreed on the new family name, but it was clear from the get-go that their respective clans had decidedly different ideas about what ECM really meant.

On the WCM side, it meant templates and tagging tools to turn every employee of the company into a Web publisher. The webbies waxed rhapsodic about all the different kinds of content you could put on the Web: HTML, XML, relational data, animated graphics, sound, video clips, source code ... Did I forget anything? Oh yeah, documents. I suppose those would work, too.

Meanwhile, the document guys thought their ability to store and index millions of images, revisable desktop documents, customer statements and invoices, training videos, and music libraries inside a humongous repository, with access to all through a Web browser, pretty much nailed the enterprise content problem. For them, ECM was all about infrastructure, repositories and APIs, the ability to search though terabytes of information and retrieve any piece of content quickly. But all the WCM people talked about was making it easier to get stuff in, not get stuff out.

Could this marriage last? Last year, it didn't look promising.

But judging from this year's AIIM show, prospects look much brighter. Instead of simply asserting that what they had always done was really enterprise content management, both sides have apparently learned to appreciate the problems they had been ignoring. Thus ECM vendors coming from the document side are now adding templates, tagging tools, and workflows designed to lower the barriers for content creators. Meanwhile, the ex-WCMers have come to realize that the Web is not actually a metaphor for life itself, but merely a convenient access point for content and collaboration, much of which revolves around documents. Increasingly, they are letting their software manage documents as documents, not simply as a set of content fragments that can be personalized or repurposed at will.

Instead of the blissful self-absorption we saw last year, vendors on both sides this year are taking a broader view of the ECM market landscape, spanning Web content and documents, and are increasingly trying to position themselves in the new market sweet spot straddling the two. I saw this with Stellent and Interwoven, Documentum and IBM. I guess that counts as an industry trend.

Another trend is the idea that ECM is becoming an enterprise-scale, rather than departmental, technology. A few infrastructure companies like IBM were pushing the concept last year, but this year it seems to have traction all around. Even the webbies are talking the enterprise story, and are now reaching out beyond the Web publishing bottleneck problem to tools for organizing and managing collaborative content throughout the company.

A third trend is that portals have now become the favored way to reach all those users. Most ECM vendors have found ways to expose content search-and-retrieval, as well as collaboration and version control, within the framework of multiple third-party portal apps.

Last year strangers with a common name, ECM vendors from the Web and document sides have quickly discovered a common purpose. However, while the overlap between the two camps has grown rapidly, it would still be incorrect to say that ECM vendors are all essentially alike. There are still those that focus on streamlining getting stuff in and "maintaining" content — coming from a WCM heritage — and those that focus on getting stuff out and "managing" content — coming from the document side. But all understand today that to make a case for the enterprise business, you need to do both well.

That means the days of cozy partnerships between Web content management vendors and enterprise repository vendors are coming to an end. Both sides now want to manage all your company's content, getting stuff in and getting stuff out. On the whole, vendors coming from the WCM side are still better at contributing and revising content. Those coming from the document side are still better at indexing and organizing content, and linking it with other business processes.

But judging from the pace of progress on both sides, the terms Web content management and document management will likely be obsolete by AIIM next year.

Bruce Silver (brsilver@earthlink.net) is president of Bruce Silver Associates, Aptos, CA, 831-685-8803. Reports are available at www.brsilver.com.