Doculabs

Waitress: What do you want in your omelet, sir?

Marty: Nothing in the omelet, nothing at all.

Waitress: Well, that’s not technically an omelet.

Marty: Look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein.  

– Grosse Pointe Blank 

The Semantic Argument

At Info360 this year, Microsoft Partners and EMC argued about who best represented the “E” of ECM. Microsoft claimed the advantage because of breadth of adoption SharePoint has within organizations. EMC claimed it because of the depth of its product stack. Previously other individuals, namely Laurence Hart, has argued that ECM isn’t a technology; it is a strategy. While in another camp, Peter Monks has argued for the death of ECM. Lee Dallas and Jon Marks have interesting takes on the “E” in ECM as well.

Mr. Dallas in particular has touched on the key disillusionment of ECM: “True believers maintain that it is possible to manage all content across an enterprise. As others have observed, reality eventually overcomes marketing, and many of us have settled into a more abstract view that considers ECM to be a practice rather than a technology.”

I agree with this statement, but I don’t think it is taken to its logical conclusion. Not only has reality overcome marketing, as Dallas points out, but it has overcome technology and strategy as well. We cannot say “ECM” and point to what it is in the real world. There is no business that has executed an ECM strategy. More importantly, business does not want an ECM strategy. It wants to solve business problems.

The retreat from discussing ECM as a practice rather than a technology has happened because we can no longer deny that pure ECM only exists in the minds of those who created the term and have proclaimed it for the past decade. It is only an idea, and it is not a shared idea. If it can be said to exist with any integrity, it is only as a chimera which fills the idle time of consultants and technology marketing staff.

We have now reached the point where speaking about ECM is only a semantic argument. There is no protein here.

The Protein

One of the primary reasons ECM has never departed Plato’s cave and taken on form is that it has refused to become particular. The grand plan for ECM was too grand. It wanted to be too many things to too many organizations. We were never going to be able to talk about managing the unstructured content of banks and manufacturing organizations in the same way. The WCM needs of an insurance company were always going to have aspects unique to that industry. RM has been incredibly important to firms in highly regulated industries, but other large organizations can get along without it.

In our efforts to communicate with our clients and actually sell our products or services, we spoke to the client’s needs and solved specific business problems. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really ECM, but it paid the bills.

So let’s all get more specific. No more discussions about DM, CM, or RM in general. I want to talk about claims processing and e-statement delivery and sales order automated processing and whatever case management ends up doing. ECM has appeared to be difficult to define because it was too big, but really it was too small. The world of managing unstructured content in discreet business processes is as large as the number of processes that exist in organizations. Think about how exciting Info360 would be if, instead of hearing about the shift in ambiguous technology capabilities, we learned how a pharmaceutical company was addressing its specific e-discovery needs in a way that was unique to that company. There would be analogies from one project to another, but ultimately there would be an acknowledged and embraced excitement that none of these similar projects are identical.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying. I’m not proposing that companies would abandon systems that are cross-departmental and then focus only on silo applications. There is a need to build a strategy that looks forward to future needs while addressing the current business process. But our vision and vocabulary need to achieve more continuity with the business community which we serve. 

The Net-Net

If we still need the term ECM, it is just because we are a community that has formed around this idea. I’m going to keep saying it. But I’ll say it ironically. I think we’d all benefit from moving our conversation away from pure theory and spending more time talking about reality – i.e. those real business problems and how the technology can solve them.