Whither ECM
ECM is dead - long live ECM!
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
07-Jun-2006
There is a hunger in larger enterprises for solutions to help the average worker handle the masses of information that they currently encounter. Management is placing equally strong demands to meet compliance requirements. Together these two drivers are providing a huge boost to the world of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).
Nevertheless these 2 trends have created new problems that, on the surface, seem difficult to reconcile, including:
- Endemic competition between 2 camps within the enterprise: those espousing traditional, heavy-duty ECM vs. those seeking "ECM for the masses."
- A dawning realization that the vast majority of content never makes it into either type of system.
- Essential Records Management activities going almost completely ignored, despite the recent compliance push.
All is not lost. I'll argue that on the one hand, the technology may not matter that much anyway, since ECM is really about processes and standards. And as enterprises sort out those processes, they may well find a need for new types of tools and systems in any case.
Thinking Differently
What we are starting to see is the emergence of a new (and sophisticated) user-driven market that views content in some new ways and is demanding something different of the traditional vendors.
The document and web content management vendors that currently dominate this space are in my view generally point solution vendors who do a very specific job with very specific pieces of business content. But the sheer volume of content now assailing us, and our networks, and our storage systems, requires that we think a little differently -- more holistically -- about the ever growing mass of content and how it impacts our business and working lives.
To the IT department that content falls into distinct types: structured, unstructured, semi-structured, email, rich media or whatever. But to the end user it's all just information. And no matter how difficult it is to envisage today, ultimately it all needs to managed together in context. This does not mean unifying the enterprise around a single product, but it does mean taking a more serious approach to all your content.
The Current Situation
To understand where we might be going, we need to grasp where we are now. At present we are seeing traditional heavyweights -- Documentum, IBM, and FileNet -- negotiating some of the biggest deals in their history. These deals have the aim of taking their intense and highly focused document- and content management capabilities across the whole enterprise. Yet a closer look at these deals reveals something a little different. In many, if not most situations, these big deals are in fact a consolidation exercise, focused on knitting together multiple instances of their own or other existing repositories (often of second-tier vendors such as Hummingbird, Open Text, Vignette, etc.) into a standard architecture or centralized repository. This is noticeably different from projects with the intent of actually rolling out ECM capabilities to all the members of an enterprise.
In parallel with this consolidation work, we are starting to see organic growth outside of the control of IT. This growth is driven by the needs and desires of local knowledge workers to bring some organization and control to their content. This may be well illustrated by the incredible viral growth in SharePoint deployments, the continued success of Xerox Docushare (now 4,500 deployments upward), in the continued resilience of 80:20 Software and the release of Oracle's 10g Content Services ("content management for the rest of us") -- all falling into the category that Gartner calls "ECM Lite."
Equal Value Content?
To put it another way, the E in ECM seems to be taking on two different (though compatible) meanings:-
- High-level ECM consolidation across the breadth of the enterprise for a subset of core business documents.
- ECM involving everyone in the enterprise
Are these 2 sets of content worth the same? Of course it depends, but they both need to be addressed in some way.
How valuable you think the two sets are may depend on where you sit. For the CIO or anyone else holding the mantle of the "enterprise," content management means compliance and consolidation. For knowledge workers, content management means being able to organize and find stuff around particular projects and activities. Hence the near unbelievable growth in SharePoint instances driven by rank-and-file employees, who get great value in terms of organizing and being able to find specific pieces of information. But at a later date this approach typically means abandoning that content in a virtual silo. Whether one can ever totally square the two viewpoints is open to debate, but I suspect successful enterprises will figure out how to slip in bare minimal controls into SharePoint type systems as a condition of use.
Why are bare minimal controls even necessary? The unwashed masses (and I include myself here) implementing their own ECM solutions is not necessarily a good thing when one considers compliance. Compliance is essential for all public or private firms, big or small, whether they like it or not. It's not just Sarbanes Oxley; it's HIPPA, it's Data Privacy, it's basic accounting and legal norms regarding the ability to retain and access business information. However, in truth many firms simply don't care as much about compliance as they would like to admit, or more accurately I suspect: massively overestimate the ability of their "IT Systems" in this regard and often get a rude awakening when an auditor arrives on the doorstep.
Pragmatic RM?
In theory, the Records Management community should have all the answers to enterprise compliance challenges. But the sheer volume of content now being generated and circulated challenges traditional RM methodologies to the core. In response many vendors are now re-branding their offerings as "retention" rather than "records management." For "retention" simply suggests wrapping some lifecycle protocols around various chunks of content, detailing what should be kept, for how long, and when to dispose and destroy. All of these are activities that underpin basic data governance and good management processes. It does not give you a system for declaring and later retrieving specific records as a proper RM system would do.
Retention is arguably a more accurate description for many of the so-called "compliance" software offerings currently available. For in fact compliance tools typically just provide basic pre-defined retention schedules against specific sets of documents and data. They can be a component of Records Management activities, and can support adhering to regulations, but the tools themselves don't actually make you compliant. To do that would require a culture of compliance, a deep understanding of your obligations to relevant regulations, and clear and clearly followed procedures. The only way you can buy compliance is to bribe the auditor.
Frankly, few firms want to spend money on Records Management at all, and the idea of ramping up their spending tenfold or more to address the volumes of content sloshing through the enterprise is unlikely to materialize. A watered down, simplified approach typified by basic but relatively effective retention structures is more likely to gain hold, particularly as firms come to realize that paper isn't going away, e-mail and IM also present a big problem, and one way or another everything needs to be managed for its legally defined lifecycle. It's not pro forma RM, but it's better than the typical, "create–>use–>forget about" model currently practiced.
Final Thoughts
As of today most firms spend little or no time studying content flows within their organization. They look instead to existing ECM vendors to offer solutions for their enterprise. Yet these ECM projects seldom ever scale out in the way envisioned due to excessive complexity and cost. Tired of waiting for solutions, regular information workers then end up finding their own solutions, and in the process rapidly, if inadvertently, add to the corporate compliance problem.
The ECM market as we know it is changing, and many ECM vendors see the writing on the wall. They are rightly repositioning themselves to become vertically specific, business application players that play on top of a content-centric infrastructure. In many cases they are assuming that the database vendors will in future own the repository, and I believe this assumption to be correct. Yet database vendors don't have all the answers and bring very little experience in managing content, let alone handling basic process or records management issues.
In the short term, the best advice for larger enterprises is to undertake serious content analysis at the enterprise level, but then avoid the tempting but dangerous conclusion that a single ECM vendor will get them wherever they want to go. It may well be that low/no cost document management tools could better meet the basic but large-scale needs of the general employee across the enterprise.