Hello and welcome to my non-Word blog. For those that don’t know me, I’ve been rattling off moderately interesting, or at least regular, posts on the subject of Content Management over on my site, the Word of Pie. AIIM asked if I wanted to give it a go here with the rest of the community so here I am.
The question is, what am I going to talk about? I want to cover new topics and keep it fresh. After a lot of thinking that lasted the length of time it took to drive home one day last week, I decided to focus on the details. I am a little over-done on the “high-art” of Enterprise Content Management and I want to focus on what can be done to help people solve their content problems.
That said, I am going to VERY briefly delve into the topic of ECM as a level-set. I’m going to link to some of my past posts elsewhere for reference, keeping this post a little high-level, and thus readily digestible.
So what is Enterprise Content Management? A lot of people focus on the words in the name and what they mean. At this point, it doesn’t matter anymore. The term is an industry standard and the concept is what matters. When I talk about ECM, I’m going to be talking about it as a strategy. Specifically:
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a strategy for the coordinated management of all content throughout an organization, allowing for people and systems to find and use content from within any business context.
That is it. You can’t buy it and if anyone tries to sell it to you, guard your wallet. It doesn’t require a single system or any Content Management System (CMS). It doesn’t have to support standards or retention.
In fact, the only thing a CMS really needs to do is allow people to store, share, and find content readily and reliably. Of course, that becomes challenging when you increase the number of documents, users, revisions, or want to use content in applications that aren’t part of Microsoft’s “productivity” suite, Office.
In fact, even if you are just one person, more capabilities are quickly required. I have to manage content for multiple publication channels, use in my day job, and my personal life. That is slowly becoming a challenge in my life.
So while a CMS might not be needed in theory, we need one in practice. Do we need to manage all content in there? No. To be honest, that is time-consuming to setup in such a manner that people will use it.
The key is to start small. Find a problem and solve it. Find the next problem and solve it. Eventually, with proper planning, all your content will be managed and you’ll be at that mythical “ECM” nirvana.
Until then, take it one step at a time. Create a strategy as a roadmap and just move on down the road.
#ECM #strategy #CMS