Has the Term Enterprise Content Management Become Outdated? Part 2

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a relatively new concept for mortgage and real-estate related businesses. Amazingly, that concept may be morphing before our very eyes—just as we begin to wrap our minds around it!

We asked our indsutry sources to look into the future of ECM not long ago, and their findings were not run-of-the-mill:

Content is a critical asset, a source of business insights and a driver of processes. How organizations create, manage, disseminate and exploit their enterprise content has changed in response to external market forces and internal business drivers. To reflect the changing market dynamics, we are retiring the term “enterprise content management” (ECM). We believe that, going forward, the practice of managing content will be enabled as a set of services that coordinate content usage by all parties: users, systems and applications.”

That’s a pretty big statement.  The white paper goes on to note that the term ECM “comes with considerable baggage” and, for many, came to represent a “top-down” or “command-and-control” culture. However, the disconnect between back-end content managers and user experience (the result of unintuitive and disconnected interfaces) often forced those managers to seek their own, additional content solutions.

In short, many businesses in other fields recognized the need for ECM. But what they used for it fell short with content managers seeking to share some of the content with clients, prospects or similar end-users.

Accordingly, ECM developers are beginning to adjust. In fact, our sources predict the following:

By 2019, the current ECM market will devolve into purpose-built, cloud-based content solutions and content services applications.

By 2020, 20% of major EFSS and ECM vendors will morph their existing offerings into content services platforms.

What does that mean, you ask?  What will the successors to the ECM look like?

“Content services platforms will have a base set of services and microservices, and content services applications will be built using them. However, in a services-oriented world, applications leaders will no longer be tied to the idea of buying a package that does everything inside of it. Some services may come from other platforms or stand-alone providers; these components add additional capability to content services applications or content services platforms. These are solutions that may or may not have an end-user interface, but enhance the capabilities of content in some way; examples include:

• An application that analyzes and automatically tags content
• A service that automates the generation of new content, such as reports or articles, based on datasets and multiple aggregated content sources
• A service that allows business users to build ad hoc content approval workflows based on forms and templates, eliminating the need for IT intervention
• An application that proactively assists teams of workers to share knowledge and assets
• A service that translates content from English to French”

It would seem that, in the past, businesses purchased single ECMs which purported to serve all purposes for all people—all within a single system.  However, when they proved to fall short at the content manager end, the content manager sought prohibited, outside applications or programs to make up for the ECM’s shortcomings.  The ECM of the “future” (some already exist) will embrace and assimilate outside applications or microservices, focusing on the UX as much as the informational strategy.

We’re staying on top of the latest here at Covius Technology Solutions.  Give us a call-let’s discuss!