ECM By Any Other Name

About a year ago, the idea began creeping into executive discussions and podcast interviews that "enterprise content management" just doesn't cut it for describing what is possible and happening with today's technologies and approaches. Indeed, just as old-school handles like "document management, "imaging" or "the paperless office" eventually gave way to newer concepts and designations, is it possible our old friend ECM is on the way out of industry favor? In January of this year, Gartner posted a blog post titled, "Death of ECM and the Birth of Content Services" from Research Director Michael Woodbridge. The assertion caused quite a stir… and for good reason. "I have been working with my team to kill off a market definition I have spent the most significant portion of my career serving," said Woodbridge in the post. "ECM is now dead (kaput, finite, an ex-market name), at least in how Gartner defines the market." Gartner is instead advocating for "Content Services" as a replacement construct that includes content, platforms and components. Forrester also chimed in to support the idea, splitting the market into two parts, Transactional Content Services and Business Content Services. But Woodbridge is quick to point out that the change in perspective is what's important, not the terminology. "It is only a definition; however, it articulates a different way of thinking about the problem that can be liberating for organizations paralyzed by the apparent need for consolidation." AIIM International stepped forward recently to propose the term "Intelligent Information Management" (IIM) as a suitable replacement. In his e-book "The Next Wave: Moving from ECM to Intelligent Information Management," John Mancini, Chief Evangelist at AIIM, puts it this way: "The role we expect content and information management to play in our organizations is clearly more than traditional data-centric ECM, and it is clearly more than Content Services.