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5 Ways to Deliver Support That Stays in Context
Corporate governance, records management, and compliance have been placed front and center this past year. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors are cashing in. At the same time ECM is taking on new meaning and new responsibilities. Is ECM really ECM any more? This topic has come up a few times today at the Gilbane Amsterdam conference. Following are a few thoughts on the matter, but we'll explore the topic in more detail in future articles.To put things succinctly, earlier today the point was made by Tony Byrne of CMSWatch that ECM purchases are now made by a completely different area of the organization. What used to be IT's domain has now fallen under corporate governance, legal, and finance. Vendors who made their name selling enterprise web content management tools are now talking document management, records management, email management, Sarbanes-Oxley, compliance, etc. This is an entirely different ball game. In this post I'm making a simple observation: that as those who were enterprise WCM players drop the word "web" from their taglines, acquire document management, portals, records management, etc. capabilities, they create a gap between mid-market WCM and what was enterprise-level WCM. Some of these vendors may be able to maintain their previous capabilities, but I reckon that most of them will be getting awfully busy pulling together the various bits and pieces of their acquisitions and market strategies. As the gap becomes wider and wider, a number of Web CMS folks will re-brand themselves as enterprise web content management players (warning) and a new market opportunity will open up for those who actually are. The new opportunity will be for the higher-end WCM vendors to become real enterprise web CMS vendors. If executed well, these folks will have a chance to start taking bites out of the market that was previously dominated by the likes of Vignette, Interwoven, and Documentum. Stay tuned for more on this topic.