Content Management Should Consider Its Users

January 20, 2015

Is it time to change our approach to content management? Big Men On Content discusses “Rebooting Enterprise Content Management.” Writer Marko Sillanpää ponders the state of the ECM field:

“Is the ECM problem … changing? That last word was hard to write, as there as many options with much stronger word option. But ECM is changing. It’s not evolving. It’s not becoming ‘Records Management’ or ‘Information Management’ or yet another iteration of ‘Knowledge Management’. It’s not dying. This vendor or that vendor is not on their last legs. It’s definitely not expanding. There are no new content types being managed. But ECM is changing. And if you look in the right places it’s growing. Customers are taking on the ECM challenge on their own. But how have we missed this change? I think we’ve been too focused.”

Sillanpää takes us back to 1998, when crucial decisions about content management were being made. He feels vendors at the time, distracted by the process of defining the shiny new field, failed to listen to their customers. He maintains that vendors are again failing to pay attention to users’ voices, this time because they are too busy watching each other.

Meanwhile, issues that vendors seems to find boring but that customers actually care about go unaddressed. As an example, the write-up cites the continued reliance on paper files at many organizations. It is an issue that truly vexes many users, yet it remains unsolved. Sillanpää may have a point; when was the phrase “paperless office” coined? And when did we give up on getting there?

Cynthia Murrell, January 21, 2015

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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