Considering ECM

The Open Text ECM Suite 2010 has arrived – having been employed by Open Text since 2003, and a participant in the ECM industry in general just as long – it's an interesting time to look back and consider how the premise of content management has evolved, and what it means to me today.

Prior to joining Open Text, I worked at another technology company in Waterloo, Ontario and during my time there had assumed the volunteer task of building and maintaining my department's intranet presence. At the time, this was not much more than HTML pages on a web server and some handy JavaScript I licensed for $20. A few months prior to leaving that company, Open Text's document management technology – at the time, Livelink – was rolled out across the organization. After recreating my department's intranet page in this new environment, I remembered thinking "wow, this seems like a bit of a ten-speed tricycle" – overly complex for a more or less simple task.

Some months later I found myself in fact employed with Open Text – and given a role in product marketing, initially set about learning the ins and outs of the technology. And that was not surprisingly eye-opening – relative to my meager past experience with the product I was faced with a long list of capabilities: auditing, metadata, classifications, notifications, permissions, to name an obvious few. Of course I started to realize the extent to which I’d underestimated the breadth of the platform.

And that was really just the outset back then. We've since seen the scope of ECM expand to include critically important foundational concepts like information archiving, and forward-looking collaboration tools like enterprise social media. We've seen the right amount of integration - not just integration for integration's sake - unify core components where it makes sense. The combination of archiving with records and retention management is so patently sound, it surprises me there exists yet vendors today who rely on tenuous connections between completely separate technologies in this regard.

But back in 2003 – the term Enterprise Content Management hadn't emerged yet. Document Management was the generic label – and analysts pushed for terms like Smart Enterprise Suites and vendors, like us, sought to emphasize their strengths and differentiation with ideas like Collaboration and Content Management. I had the good fortune (which manifested itself at the time as many long evenings on my deck working on contributions) to be a part of the creation of Tom Jenkins's original ECM book. Shortly thereafter ECM became a more broadly accepted term within the market, and one that has been surprisingly constant since.

A lot changes in seven years, not just in a company but across an entire industry. Analysts come and go, and so do vendors. Customer deployments evolve from simple departmental file share replacements to true enterprise wide records management initiatives. New content types emerge demanding governance, and employees adopt new working paradigms for how they want to get their jobs done. And although I've never been a fan of generic technology labels – Enterprise Content Management is I think one of the guiltier ones, gleefully vague and vast – there is a stability and persistence in the concept of ECM, one that has united vendors and brought cohesion to complex customer projects. That steadiness is, I think, what ECM most means to me.