Why Enterprise Content Management and Google Docs Are Not the Same

By David Roe (@druadh20) Aug 16, 2011

Recently, Alan Weintraub of Forrester Research published a paper in which he posed an interesting question: Can Google solve your ECM needs? Let's have a look.

Written with Mathew Brown and Joseph Dang, what it boils down to is an examination of Google Apps, and Docs in particular, and then asks, on the basis of that examination, whether Google can fulfill a company’s enterprise content management needs.

This may seem to be an obvious question, with an even more obvious answer, but the fact that it is being asked at the moment is, in itself, interesting.

However, to answer the simple question with an equally simple answer: No; neither Google Docs, nor even Google Apps can compete with a well planned and well developed enterprise content management system. It just doesn’t have the functionality — not yet, at least.

We say this because anyone who is familiar with Google Apps and Docs will know that its functionality while extensive is still considerably less than an Enterprise CMS.

Even if Google keeps adding to Apps and Docs on a weekly basis, as it seems to do at the moment, it is still a long way off from providing ECM functionality.

In fairness to Google, it has never claimed to offer that. With Docs, all it has ever claimed is that it can offer a relatively cheap alternative to current productivity suites like Office 2010, or even Zoho.

Google Docs Drivers

So why would this ever have become an issue? There are two answers we think, both of them related.

Lack of a clear understanding about the functionality of Google Docs and what it is for
Lack of clarity over what an enterprise content management should consist of

In both cases, it is not the business users fault either that there should be a lack of clarity.

Rather, it reflects the rapid rate of the expanding functionality of both Google Docs and enterprise content management systems.

Google Docs was created in 2007 as a way for people to share documents easily. Four years later, Weintraub says, 8% of IT departments support Google Docs for productivity, and 9% support Google Apps for business for collaboration needs.

He says that calls to Forrester from enterprises show that the pick up of Google Docs is driven by three different trends:

Consumerization: This is when users learn a new technology at home and bring it into work with them. Here, he cites Gmail as the driver, which would have been brought into the work place and resulted in employees using other Google tools like Docs.
Cloud Hype: Google has actively promoted itself as a cloud purist, and cloud computing has become associated with lean, agile and low-cost IT, and many users expect it to solve all their IT problems.
ECM “backlash”: Google Docs is perceived as a low cost, easy to deploy and easy to use technology. Inquires to Forrester are increasingly concerned with how Google Docs fits within the ECM function.

Google Docs and Document Management

Specifically, Weintraub says, users are looking a number of different functions that are provided by many enterprise content management systems, but for a variety of reasons, including price and ease of use, they are turning to Google Docs.