Last Updated on May 15, 2023 Sarah Gayda
Enterprise content management (ECM) is not what it used to be – that’s certain. In fact, many analysts agree that ECM is, in fact, dead. It all started with a quiet declaration on Gartner’s blog, “ECM is now dead (kaput, finite, an ex-market name). It’s been replaced by the term Content Services.” How does Gartner define Content Services?
“…a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.”
Today’s information managers politely disagree. According to AIIM, they prefer not to play the semantics game and simply believe that enterprise content management is evolving:
I agree with both the analysts and today’s information managers, who are very passionate and very responsible for managing greater volumes and more complex corporate content than every before in history. So when I was invited by KM World to speak about the future of enterprise content management (ECM) in a recent webinar, I thought it wise to first take a look back at the evolution of enterprise content management.
Enterprise content management was most certainly at the top of any IT agenda in 1995. It was a difficult task to manage growing volumes of new digital content. Systems and technologies were hard to use, complex, highly customized, and expensive.
Six years later came the initial release of Microsoft SharePoint in 2001! SharePoint revolutionized enterprise content management with each subsequent release. The enterprise content management space was forever disrupted.
Today, with the mass adoption of mobile devices, enterprise file sync and share tools, and the move to the cloud, effective enterprise content management is evolving into a highly sophisticated content services game. And Microsoft is still at the forefront …
.. bringing forward new levels of functionality for managing and governing enterprise content:
For more of my thoughts on this topic, I invite you to watch the recording to the recent KM World webinar “The Future of Enterprise Content Management.”
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