Traditional content and document management systems have been around for two decades. As is the case in many other areas, the achievements of these past systems influence our expectations as we think about where content management is going.
Enterprise Content Management, or ECM, initially focused on automating content-intensive, complicated, integral processes. The solutions were somewhat difficult to use and required lots of training. It really didn’t matter because the people who used these systems were records specialists, not average knowledge workers. The solutions were complex, custom and expensive, but that didn’t matter so much because of the mission-critical process problems these systems solved.
The vast success of ECM technologies – in automating large-scale and strategic processes like new drug applications and managing insurance policies and processing checks – casts a long shadow, one that we’re only beginning to escape. That shadow is a tendency to define every on a large scale. It assumes that every user will be as diligent about managing content and information as a records manager. And that every user is sitting in a conventional office, working on a desktop.
The reality is that the technology landscape has changed profoundly over the past decade, driven by radical innovations that originated in the consumer realm, and fueled by the computing expectations of millennials.
So what does modern content management look like? What does the new generation of content management users expect from their systems?