CMS Watch has a good article on the pitfalls of Enterprise Content Management (ECM): "ECM" -- Don't buy it by Jim Howard. ECM, in a nutshell, tries to bring all of the content (web publishing, document management, asset management, etc) needs of a large organization into a single system. The author, the head of a company that offers ECM services, argues that ECM fails to live up to its promise in the real world.
I'll let you read the article to get Howard's full argument, but I wanted to highlight a few of the items on a list of things he "believes in":
2. Shared document repositories are highly valuable. In some types of companies -- like law firms and consulting firms -- document knowledge management should be a primary mission of IT. Segmented repositories and small steps are the way to get these programs working. Simple implementations typically work best - especially at first.
3. Enterprises should concentrate on making intranets into content visibility tools -- enable easy publishing for the workgroups who have valuable content to share, but don't enable publishing for every employee unless you want a big mess.
4. Workspaces, where groups can share and collaborate on documents and other assets are a great idea. They should be very simple to set-up and self-manage.
(via Column Two.)
Posted by Karl
March 31, 2003 12:02 PM