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The vision of enterprise contentmanagement (ECM) as a singlesystem to manage all contentbecame popular in 2000 and 2001.In theory, having a single, central-ized system to organize and man-age all of an organization’s contentinto an accessible and navigableelectronic library is very attractive.Companies must manage a widearray of assets, including internalhow-to documents to support busi-ness processes, internal and exter-nal correspondence, marketingliterature, and product documenta-tion. Organizations are buried indigital content, leaving peoplescrambling to find the right infor-mation when they need it.

Both vendors and customers enthu-siastically embraced the ECM visionof transforming content from achaotic mess to an organized andpowerful asset. Recently, however,this vision has been the focus ofsubstantial criticism from cus-tomers and industry analysts alike.In practice, implementing one sys-tem to manage all electronic con-tent within an enterprise has turnedout to be impractical, risky, andexpensive. As a result, customersare turning to solutions with lesslofty claims and more reasonablecosts. Increased attention to middlemarket vendors and open sourcesoftware is evidence of this trend.

WHAT IS ECM?

Despite its widespread use, there isvery little consensus on the mean-ing of the term “enterprise contentmanagement.” Seasoned CM pro-fessionals typically describe ECMas a set of best practices and toolsto manage documents. These prac-tices address authoring, formats,workflow, storage, publication, andarchiving. Steve Manning of theRockley Group lists ECM, alongwith Web content management(WCM), digital asset management(DAM), and learning content man-agement (LCM) as distinct cate-gories of content management [4].The Association for Informationand Image Management (AIIM)defines ECM as “technologiesused to capture, manage, store,preserve, and deliver contentand documents related to orga-nizational processes” [1]. In otherwords, the “enterprise” refers to thesubject of the content rather thanall content contained within anenterprise.

In 2000, ECM became an industrybuzzword to describe a class ofcommercial software that could“manage all of your content typesfor all of your business challenges”[6]. How did ECM go from beingstandards and practices for manag-ing content to a solution to manage

all content? There were a numberof market forces at work.

First, companies found themselvesswimming in documents but starv-ing for information and not sharingacross departmental boundaries.Information is power, but it isuseless when scattered acrossemployee hard drives and e-mailin-boxes across the enterprise.

Vol. 18, No. 5

From Enterprise Content Management to Effective Content Management

by Seth Gottlieb

CONTENT MANAGEMENTDEFINITIONS

Web content management (WCM)refers to technologies that managecontent on a Web site. WCM systemstend to be “page” or “article” focusedand use a publishing paradigm ofworkflow and approvals. During theInternet bubble, WCM attracted muchattention in the CM space.

Records management (RM) refersto technologies and processes usedto store records (such as e-mail anddigitized copies of paper documents)over time.

Document management (DM)refers to technologies used to storedocuments. Typically these systemssupport basic file storage plus ver-sioning, access control, and basicmetadata capture.

Digital asset management (DAM)systems establish a library of reusabledigital assets with a focus on imagefiles (such as logos) and media files(audio and video).

The large WCM companies, suchas Vignette and divine, had reachedthe apex of their market and lookedat enterprise content as an attrac-tive sector to pursue. The largedocument management compa-nies, such as Documentum andInterwoven, retaliated by trying tobreak into the WCM space. Thetwo camps launched a featurechecklist war. To be recognizedby industry analysts as a player inthe ECM sector, nearly every con-tent management system (CMS)vendor claimed it could holisticallysolve the crisis of content growingout of control. This content crisisresonated with customers whowere willing to suspend their

disbelief in the hope that ECM reallywas the magic bullet to solve it.

THE “ERP OF CONTENT”

From a marketing perspective, ECMis an excellent term because it con-notes “enterprise class” and createsan up-market brand. Targeted CMSproducts that were worthy of con-sideration by large companies wereeffectively excluded because theydidn’t carry the ECM label. ECMbecame the “ERP of content.” ECMvendors asked customers to stan-dardize on an architecture or suiteof products and, in return, promisedefficiency, control, and better intelli-gence. To fulfill this promise, ECMvendors extended their products oracquired other products to deliverfunctionality in what came to bedefined as the three areas of ECM:WCM, DM, and DAM.

But there are several inherentflaws in the vision of becomingthe ERP of content. First, ERP isfocused on automating and sup-porting certain well-defined and/or highly regulated businessprocesses (accounting, humanresources management, manufac-turing, etc.), and there is standard-ization on the structure of the data,the organizational roles of its users,and how it is used. While the busi-ness environment is starting tochange in regard to regulating themanagement of content, contentmanagement is still less defined.“Content” is an abstract term thatspans a diverse set of assets, users,and uses. Everyone within an enter-prise is responsible for producing orconsuming some sort of content.

Users do not think of all these assetsas being variants of “content” to behandled in a uniform way. Whyshould the system? Managing con-tent is often inseparable from thebusiness processes and organiza-tions that the content supports.Consequently, content manage-ment is a specific, rather than gen-eral, enterprise problem. Sharinginformation across departments isan enterprise problem, but ECM isnot necessarily the solution. Whileexecuting an ERP project is a formi-dable challenge,1 ECM projectscould be considered even riskierbecause of the diversity of require-ments, stakeholders, and goals andthe comparative difficulty of meas-uring the benefits. It is difficult toalign the goals of project sponsorsfrom across the enterprise, and as aresult, ECM projects are hard to sell.

PROJECT SCOPE AND TIME TO BENEFIT

When ECM tries to universallysolve many distinct CM problemsacross the enterprise, the numberof stakeholders becomes over-whelming and ECM projects growlarge and complicated. Require-ments are difficult to collect acrossdisparate user groups with diverseprocesses. Analysis takes time.Each group must make compro-mises that it would not need tomake if the system were built justfor its use.

The result is that the business waitsa long time to receive a CMS that

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THE RACE TO ECM

December 2001: Documentumacquires Bulldog for DAM.

April 2002: FileNet acquires eGrailfor WCM.

October 2002: Documentum acquireseRoom for collaboration.

December 2002: Vignette acquiresEpicentric for portal capabilities.

June 2003: Interwoven acquiresMediaBin for digital RM.

August 2003: Open Text acquiresGauss for WCM.

August 2003: Interwoven acquiresiManage for DM.

September 2003: Vignette acquiresIntraspect for collaboration andknowledge management.

February 2004: Vignette acquiresTower for DM.

August 2004: Interwoven acquiresSoftware Intelligence’s RM systems.

August 2004: Open Text acquiresArtesia Technologies for DAM. 1A survey of CEOs found that 65% believe

that ERP systems could be harmful [2].

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disappoints in the end. After thesystem is deployed, enhancementrequests are often ignored as theyare prioritized and reconciledwith conflicting requests. Users nolonger feel ownership of the systemand look for workarounds that sub-vert the intent of a unified system.One survey found that more than aquarter of CMS owners were so dis-appointed with their systems thatthey were contemplating scrappingthem and building custom systemsin their place [3].

FROM “ONE THROAT TO CHOKE”TO “ONE NOOSE TO HANG IN”

For some buyers, a major attractionof a universal CMS or suite of proj-ects sold by a single vendor is riskreduction. The components areproven to work together; and if theydo not, there is only one phone callto make. However, many cus-tomers seeking this security havehad a frustrating experience. Themajor ECM vendors have beengoing through a period of rapidchange both in strategy and in tech-nology. The pace of mergers andacquisitions (M&As) has out-stripped their ability to integratetheir components. For example,Vignette customers have beenforced through difficult upgradesas the product architecture shiftedfrom Tcl to ASP to Java, and theacquisition of Intraspect broughtJython into the mix. With onemajor product release, Vignettecustomers were asked to repur-chase their licenses. Customers ofFatWire’s Content Server had toendure a harrowing journey of theirproduct being passed from vendor

to vendor through acquisitions andbankruptcies. At one point, a judgeoverseeing a liquidation auctionforced Content Server, along withwhat is now SilkRoad’s Epriseproducts, into a bundle with ahosting business.

This rocky history of M&As andtechnology change has reducedthe benefit of “one throat to choke”to a risk of “one noose to hang in.”An organization’s content is toovaluable to be controlled by asingle vendor. Despite some ven-dor backpedaling, most analystsexpect more M&A activity in thefuture. The content will outlive thevendor. Managing content with asingle product that necessarily hasa fixed lifespan is irresponsible.Customers would do best to hedgetheir bets and stagger their invest-ments in CM solutions.

Analysts today are skeptical ofECM vendors’ ability to integratetheir acquisitions. In the openingkeynote panel at the November2004 Gilbane Conferenceon Content ManagementTechnologies, IDC’s Joshua Duhlbegan the discussion with theprovocative statement “ECM is amyth,” and a lively debate resulted.Most of the panelists concurredthat they were not aware of anenterprise-wide ECM implemen-tation that successfully managedall content types. Furthermore,several commentators assertedthat it would be years before theECM vendors could integrate thetechnologies they had acquired.Interestingly, in the April 2005Gilbane conference opening panel,one analyst who had defended

ECM in the 2004 debate made thepoint that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in content manage-ment. Two of the major themes ofthe spring Gilbane conferencewere specialization and content-centric applications.

Since then, ECM vendors have beentoning down their ECM visions aswell. FatWire has repositioned itsContent Server product, an ECMaspirant back in 2001, as a WCMtool. New ECM entrant Oracle callsits product “ECM Light” and “ECMfor the rest of us” by adding version-ing, simple workflow, metadatacapture, and improved authentica-tion to the file system paradigm tocreate an easy-to-use, inexpensivedocument management solution.Vignette’s marketing site now cen-ters on specific business problemssuch as Web site and brand man-agement, employee intranets, andcustomer self-service Web sites.

TIME TO RETHINK

While the major ECM vendors werefocused on offering more breadth,many forward-thinking customersstarted to look for specialized andusable CM solutions and ways toshare information between them.They found usability a key successfactor in their CM initiatives becausetheir internal users found ways towork around unusable systems.

Two of the most interesting trendsin content management are opensource and hosted solutions (suchas Atomz and CrownPeak). Middlemarket products that focus on aparticular discipline within contentmanagement (such as WCM, DM, or

Vol. 18, No. 5 15

DAM), which had been languishingin the shadows of the major ECMvendors, are also getting more atten-tion because of their fitness to pur-pose. Targeted solutions tend to becheaper and have the potential forgreater usability if they are designedto solve a specific problem.

A HEALTHIER APPROACH

ECM is a strategy to eliminatecontent stovepipes, which reduceefficiency within an organization.However, if such stovepipes areinterconnected with open APIs andstandards, they become a “feder-ated” application infrastructure thatachieves the same benefits withoutthe large initial investment and riskof consolidation. There are manypublic examples of third-partyapplications that integrate contentfrom disparate sources to provide amore holistic view of information.For example, consider all the shop-ping aggregator sites that providethe shopper a unified experienceof product catalogs from multiplesources. Note that most of the infor-mation sources were not originallydesigned to have their content usedin this way, but open standards andarchitectures (at first, simple HTTPand now full APIs) make it possiblefor existing content to have newvalue.

A number of strategies and tacticscan help an organization establish afederated content architecture thatintegrates content across the enter-prise without forcing users into oneinfeasible solution. With the feder-ated approach, managers can usebest-of-breed technologies as theyemerge with less disruption to the

organization. The following aresome key concepts and technolo-gies to consider.

Metadata, Taxonomy, andStructured Data CaptureNo matter what the technology,any successful organization-wideCM initiative (ECM or otherwise)requires a holistic view of the con-tent that the organization intends tomanage. One practice that helpsdevelop this perspective is defininga taxonomy to classify content. Byhaving a common language toorganize and describe content, it iseasier for consumers of content, bethey users or other systems, to findwhat they need. Creating a taxon-omy is tedious work that requiresinput from across the business.However, it is essential to have aholistic view of content even if itexists in different systems. Thisprocess often has two positive sideeffects for managers: it maps outorganizational knowledge andenables a better understanding ofbusiness processes.

In addition to taxonomy, the organi-zation should capture other meta-data that describes content, how itshould be displayed, and to whom.Many existing CMSs can be config-ured to enforce the same metadatacollection requirements and pub-lish this metadata along with thecontent. The Dublin Core is a goodplace to start.2 Additional metadatamay enable more sophisticated

content reuse and integration, andmetadata can be captured at theentire asset and subelement level.However, extensive metadata cap-ture requirements will make thesystem more difficult to use andless likely to be adopted. As always,organizations must strike the rightbalance.

The more structured the content,the more potential there is forreuse. Storage formats that sepa-rate content structure from layoutand break the asset down intogranular chunks can be used bydifferent systems to be published ina variety of formats. Using open for-mats for storage (such as MP3 overReal Media) will increase the likeli-hood that other systems will beable to read the content assets.

Enterprise Search and PortalsThe most common and straight-forward technology for aggregatingcontent from disparate sources isenterprise search. After all, searchmade the Web — a potentiallychaotic universe of independentpublishers — an amazingly usefulresource. The quality of the resultthat a search tool can provide isgreatly enhanced by metadata thataccompanies the content. Search-based content integration is mosteffective in environments with sim-ple authorization rules and networksecurity for viewing content. If theorganization uses an applicationsecurity approach instead, IT

©2005 Cutter Information LLCMay 200516

2The Dublin Core is a standard set of metadata that describes the content, origin,and purpose of a resource. Examples of Dublin Core elements are title, coverage(the topics that the resource covers), source, date, audience, publisher, and lan-guage. The Dublin Core is managed and promoted by the Dublin Core MetadataInitiative (http://dublincore.org) and is widely used in systems that manage anddistribute content.

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professionals will have to manageauthorization logic needs withintwo systems: the search systemand the source system.

Portal technologies can delivermore fine-grained access controland tighter content integration.Through standards-based archi-tectures, such as the emergingWeb Services for Remote Portlets(WSRP) and Java SpecificationRequest (JSR) 168: PortletSpecification, it is possible toembed both content and applica-tion logic (such as authorizationrules) in aggregated pages. Theportal architecture has becomemainstream in large enterprises,and the infrastructure is highlyleveragable for content integrationstrategies.

Emerging Publishing StandardsThat Enable Information SharingBetween SystemsBeyond portals, there are severalother emerging standards to helpWeb-based applications maketheir content accessible toother applications. XML-basedpublishing formats such as RichSite Summary (RSS), Atom, andResource Description Framework(RDF) may change the CM tech-nology landscape from monolithicarchitectures to networks ofcontent applications that shareinformation. Most of thesestandards-based technologiescan be retrofitted onto existingapplications. If these trends takeroot, and they appear to be doingso, the advantage of having a cen-tralized universal CMS will diminishrapidly. Of course, the quality and

standardization of the metadatacapture and the openness andstructure of the storage format willdrive the degree to which contentcan be shared and reused.

API-Level IntegrationThere are numerous examples ofcompanies that are integratingtheir CMSs at the application levelto develop a comprehensive con-tent infrastructure. An excellentexample of an application-levelintegration strategy is financial ser-vices company Wachovia and itsContent Access Services system[5]. Through acquisition of severallarge financial services companies,Wachovia inherited a heteroge-neous group of document and digi-tal records management systems,including IBM ImagePlus, FileNet,and Mobius. Wachovia’s data oncustomers was scattered acrossseveral systems, while its customersupport representatives needed aunified view to serve the customer.Rather than try to migrate all thedata into one system and retirethe rest, Wachovia developed anabstraction layer that provides acommon interface accessible todesktop call center support tools.This architecture minimizes migra-tion costs, leverages existing invest-ments in content technologies, andenables Wachovia to select best-of-breed solutions and embrace newtechnologies that meet the require-ments of specific business groups.

Web services are also becom-ing an important standard inintegrating content technologies.SOAP interfaces can be built on

existing systems to expose variousfunctionality. Many open sourceand commercial CMSs natively sup-port SOAP APIs. Through the use ofWeb services standards like WebServices Flow Language (WSFL), itis easier to coordinate different sys-tems to support complex businessprocesses.

Open RepositoriesIn July 2002, JSR 170 was submittedto the Java Community Process(JCP) for a standard Java ContentRepository (JCR). This standardcreates a content repository thatdifferent CMS products can use tostore content much in the sameway that a SQL-compliant databaseis used by applications for savingdata. The specification is led byDay Software (a CMS vendor), andmany of the major ECM vendors(Vignette, Documentum) and com-panies that are now getting into theECM market (Oracle and IBM) par-ticipated in the expert group. JSR170 is currently in the proposedfinal draft stage and is expectedto be finalized in the next coupleof months.

Once final, companies such asIBM are expected to offer JSR 170–compliant repositories. Jackrabbit,an Apache Software Foundationproject to build a JCR referenceimplementation, is progressingnicely, and Day Software’s CMS andseveral open source CMS projects(Magnolia, Apache Lenya, Graffito)are integrating with it. In addition,Day has just released a beta versionof its commercial JCR.

Vol. 18, No. 5 17

The existence of a common con-tent repository with a standards-based API could change the faceof ECM from an application-centricarchitecture to a data-centricarchitecture in which multipleapplications can read from thesame repository or applicationscan access multiple repositories.The JCR would reduce vendor lock-in and help companies rapidlydevelop content-centric applica-tions that solve specific businessneeds.

Web-based Distributed Authoringand Versioning (WebDAV), a stan-dard defining the HTTP extensionsthat enable reading and writing filesfrom a repository, is already widelyused in commercial and opensource software. When used withXML-based content, WebDAV canbe a powerful shared contentrepository, accessible from a num-ber of clients and applications.

CONCLUSION

In this age of information and theknowledge worker, companiesthat cannot make more effectiveuse of content will be operating ata distinct disadvantage. The riskof information loss, redundancy,and misinformation necessitatesa sound content strategy for theenterprise. However, the ECMvision of one system to manage

all content is not the only solution,nor is it the best solution, because itintroduces costs and risks that arenot worth the benefit. Full and suc-cessful ECM implementations arerare, if any exist at all.

The term “ECM” will continue tobe used to describe best practiceswithin the processes of managingcontent (capture, manage, store,deliver, preserve), but the assertionthat one system can do it all israpidly losing credibility. The trendis toward a more distributed, ratherthan consolidated, approach of tar-geted content applications that aremade interoperable by open stan-dards and technologies.

REFERENCES

1. “About Enterprise ContentManagement (ECM).” AIIMWeb site (www.aiim.org/about-ecm.asp).

2. Cliffe, Sarah. “ERPImplementation: How to Avoid $100 Million Write-Offs.” HarvardBusiness Review, Vol. 77, No. 1,January-February 1999, pp. 16-17.

3. Howard, Jim. “‘ECM’ — Don’tBuy It.” CMS Watch, 26 March 2003(www.cmswatch.com/Features/OpinionWatch/FeaturedOpinion/?feature_id=87).

4. Manning, Steve. “What’s the BestContent Management System? It Depends ... ” The Rockley Report,Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2004 (www.rockley.com/TheRockleyReport/V1I1/Tools%20and%20Technology.htm).

5. Walter, Mark. Wachovia’s CAS:Harnessing the Value of MultipleContent Repositories Across a LargeEnterprise. Content TechnologyWorks report, Gilbane, 2004(www.gilbane.com/case_studies_pdf/CTW_Wachovia_Final.pdf).

6. West, Kelley, Brook Foust, andChristine Klima. “Understandingthe ECM Market.” AIIM E-DOCMagazine, November/December2002 (www.edocmagazine.com/vault_articles.asp?ID=25375).

Seth Gottlieb leads the ContentManagement and Collaboration Practiceat Optaros, Inc. Optaros is a consultingand systems integration firm based inCambridge, Massachusetts, USA, thathelps organizations lower their technol-ogy costs by building more flexible andhigher-quality systems based on opensource software. With 10 years of IT andtechnology experience in both softwareand professional services, Mr. Gottliebhas helped numerous companiesimprove the efficiency and effectivenessof their CM and publishing processes.

Mr. Gottlieb can be reached at Optaros,Inc., 155 Second Street, Cambridge,MA 02142, USA. Tel: + 1 617 225 2455; E-mail: sgottlieb@optaros.com; Web site:www.optaros.com.

©2005 Cutter Information LLCMay 200518