2012 - When Content Meets Context

By John Powell (@alfresco) Dec 19, 2011

We are entering a period of profound change for the creation and consumption of information and content in the enterprise. While it has been clear for many years that content is the core of the information society, we are only on the verge of reaching the promise of the information-powered enterprise.

It is through content that we engage, converse, and represent ideas. In business, the management of content is how we traditionally drove employee productivity (by streamlining knowledge creation and sharing) and ensured business integrity (audit, approval, compliance and brand integrity).

As we move into 2012, however, we have three forces that will push information and content management into new realms, new use cases and a form of usage undreamed of just a few years ago.

What Are the 3 Forces?

This should be no surprise, but cloud computing, the rise of mobile computing and the adoption (not arrival) of social in the enterprise are drastically reshaping our relationship to content.

First — cloud computing has given rise to the most diverse, distributed and global workforce in human history. The cloud eliminates many barriers to creating a virtual workforce, and ushers in entirely new demands on the IT department. As IT departments push more compute power to the cloud, the ratio of on-site vs. virtual employees is turned on its head even more.

Mobile Devices and Access — if the cloud gives access to content, systems and compute power from anywhere in the world, the rise of mobile only amplifies the effect. Information workers are using mobile devices to access information on the go, from any location, regardless of the content type. In fact, mobile devices have only increased engagement with a variety of content types, amplifying not just the need for access, but changing the mix of content types that the average information worker interacts with.

Social Networking — put simply, social networking has dramatically altered the means by which information workers communicate. What used to be a conference call is now a Yammer room, or a status update with a thread of comments, or a MMS with a shot of a whiteboard brainstorm. The average businessperson communicates in entirely different ways than just a few years ago, and that communication produces more user-generated digital content than ever before.

But it’s not these three factors alone that are changing information and content management. It’s their combined effect that is reshaping the content-driven information economy.

These three factors are forcing organizations to merge content with context.

They are driving an explosion in metadata that makes it possible to not only more effectively consume or share content, but to do so with a 360-degree view of the context behind the ideas, decisions and goals of any given piece of content.

Context Reveals the Past, Present and Future

So what does context mean for the future of content management? Well it means the core competency of content management, namely the management of metadata (the information that defines the context of content) is now the key technology to the exploitation of the opportunities these forces have unleashed.

Context has three important effects on people and enterprises.

1. Explaining the Past

Perhaps the best example of illuminating the past is the classic case of version control, editing documents and reaching a “final.” If there’s a social stream outlining the conversation, decisions and opinions that shaped a document, you can follow the thought process and immediately take your editing pass with a full understanding of what transpired between ideation and the current version of a piece of content.