ECM is an aspirational term for many, one that suggests a single layer/platform/system/methodology that will address your enterprise content needs no matter how complex, diverse, or voluminous. Some major vendors promote this approach, and buyers for such systems also exist, but they make up only a small minority in this market. So, though it may seem a little dull by comparison, from now on we will use the terms Document Management and Records Management where they apply, and will reserve the exotic ECM moniker for that rare breed of big, complex, and typically very expensive platforms that actually merit such a grandiose term.

It has always surprised me how many firms name their internal ECM applications and systems after the product that it runs on. For example, I have come across many organizations over the years that tell me things like-

Like all maturity models, it is partly descriptive and partly prescriptive. You can apply the model to audit, assess, and explain your current state, as well as inform a roadmap for maturing your enterprise capabilities.

This is great stuff, and I’m very pleased to see this produced by a number of our very close colleagues overseas. Definitely worth downloading, and with its creative commons licence, there are sure to many uses!

For the past year or so there seems to have been a battlefield of sorts emerging between proponents of social networking and all things E2.0 and the more “traditional” proponents of ECM. The difference between the two seems to have emerged due to a confluence of events.

I’m on the same page s Alan, and it’s something that I’ve posted about before.

More and more these days, content lives at the edges of the network, on laptops and desktop machines and collaboration servers (and in SQL Server instances that support a group’s SharePoint users), all across the enterprise. Silos now come in all sizes (and live in all kinds of places). And content itself is more protean than ever.

Over the last years, I’ve heard consultants, analysts, experts, gurus and even some vendors preach that strategy is the vital ingredient that’s too often missing in many organisations. For ECM projects, I certainly agree that technology is rarely the right place to start, but still earlier today at the Online Information conference in London, I argued that an ECM strategy is not required.

Amen to this! I’ve said before that organisations should avoid long-term strategies, and the 10 principles of effective information management are focused squarely on delivering tangible business benefits.