ECM Needs a Makeover, Yet Its Capabilities Are More Critical Than Ever

Yes, I know "ECM" is supposed to be passé now. Per Merriam-Webster, the three definitions of passé are:

1. past one's time
2. outmoded
3. behind the times

Now I would be among the first -- and have been saying so for the past three years -- to say that the "ECM" term is in need of a makeover. Witness the work we have been doing regarding Intelligent Information Management.

My main concern is that I don't think the "ECM" term does justice to all of the incredible things people are doing with content and information. But that DOES NOT mean that content management capabilities are irrelevant; in fact, they are more important than ever, albeit in new and changing forms.

In the midst of all of the "ECM is dead" conversations, I recently participated in a very refreshing and passionate panel at one of the IBM Content 2017 summits. The two end user organizations on the panel took great objection to the "ECM is dead" conversation and insisted that rather than being dead, content management is more important than ever to their organizations -- and in fact, content management is a core enabling set of capabilities to everything they do and in their efforts to drive digital transformation in their organizations.

These two organizations have been doing ECM at massive scale for a LONG time -- three decades -- and shared some important lessons about how their content management capabilities and requirements have changed over time, the lessons learned along the way - warts and all, and how they are continuing to morph their capabilities in the era of analytics.

I was so impressed with their passion that I asked them whether they would be willing to recreate the conversation we had on a webinar so that it could be shared with a broader audience. And so we did.

Lessons from Three Decades of ECM Experience

A replay of the webinar can be viewed here:

On the webinar, we discuss in great detail the following topics:

• How can you use a shared services approach to expand and evolve your initial content management investment?
• How do you “sell” – and deliver – content capabilities to the “business”?
• What does it mean when content management capabilities become mission-critical – i.e., content systems can never go down?
• How do content management challenges change when the scale is massive – millions or billions of documents?
• How have the content and information management skills needed to support your operation changed over time?
• What comes next? How are you using analytics to push your content management investment to the next level?

Enjoy!