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Is “enterprise content management” too broad?

Written by James Robertson, published November 24, 2004

Categorised under: Conferences & presentations, Content management

I am in the middle of a conference on enterprise content management (ECM), being held in KL, Malaysia. Plenty of good talks, but what strikes me most is how diverse the subject-matter is.

Topics covered at the conference include (in no particular order):

  • data modelling and integrity
  • information lifecycle management
  • web publishing processes
  • metadata and taxonomies
  • web content management
  • document management
  • records management
  • storage
  • IT architecture
  • knowledge management
  • portals
  • corporate governance & compliance
  • process modelling
  • security

All of these topics can legitimately fit under the banner of “ECM”. Having this huge scope, however, introduces some problems and challenges:

  • It’s hard to construct a conference that can meaningfully cover all of ECM, in sufficient depth.
  • Conference participants aren’t likely to be interested in (or understand) all of these topics. Instead, they are probably focusing on just a few aspects.
  • Bridging the terminology gaps between such diverse topics is very hard.
  • In fact, there is very little overlap between the areas of activity of many of the participants.
  • While it’s easy to talk about “ECM” at a theoretical level, it’s very difficult to explore at a practical level without focusing on just one of the areas listed above.

All of these issues reinforces my feelings about ECM: that it is to vague to be really useful, other than to provide a “brand” for vendors to align themselves under. In practice, no-one does ECM. Rather, they do one (or more) of the specific areas, such as CM, DM, RM, etc.

I will therefore continue to avoid using the term “ECM”…