It has now been over 1,000 days since Gartner analyst Michael Woodbridge published his blog titled “The Death of ECM and birth of content services“.
His most telling quote is “ECM is now dead (kaput, finite, an ex-market name), at least in how Gartner defines the market. It’s been replaced by the term Content Services, a strategic concept that covers three aspects, namely Content Services Applications, Platforms and Components.” What has also happen in the last 1000 days include:
- Microsoft has basically given away Sharepoint in the cloud with Office365 subscriptions.
- OpenText purchased the ECD division from Dell/EMC consolidating the Documentum portfolio.
- Kofax purchased the Nuance capture business.
- Box platform has become reality to bring more enterprise needs to born-in-cloud content storage.
The result is a whole new landscape of math around costing/economics and technology roadmaps that give firms options to consolidate their legacy ECM technologies into a more nimble (and cheaper) content services environment.
Taking a quote from an AIIM presentation given by industry expert Tom Rieger, the challenge for everyone is now they compare in the total customer experience against not just your competitors – but to their ‘last best’ digital experience like Netflix or Amazon. HOW DO YOU ACCOMPLISH THAT WITHOUT A MORE NIMBLE CONTENT STRATEGY? <The video is here>
His research goes deeper into the problems and what those solution options should be going forward.
So here we are 1,000 days later after many an industry pundit has tried to defend ‘ECM’ and for most firms NOTHING CHANGED. As we roll into the next 1,000 days and 2020, it may be time to start chipping away at the broad and messy legacy ECM portfolio and take better advantage of where the investments and innovation are taking place.
InfoDNA brings a long history in knowing ECM technologies and also how to make that pivot into a more consolidated and nimble services environment with their Topla technologies. Problems like ‘I don’t know what is in there’ or ‘across repositories there could be any number of versions of the same document’ are all solved with InfoDNA. Investigate, Assess, Recommend, Migrate/Consolidate. Give us 100 days and we can drive transformation that makes sense.
