BetterECM - russ stalters’ Blog on Exploring NextGen ECM

According to Wikipedia, Enterprise content management (ECM) is a widely-recognized IT-industry term for software technology that enables organizations to create/capture, manage/secure, store/retain/destroy, publish/distribute, search, personalize, and present/view/print digital content such as pictures/images, text, reports, video, audio, transactional data, catalog, code. ECM systems primarily focus on the capture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of digital files for enterprise use and their life-cycle management.

Well, enterprise content management or ECM as termed by Analysts and quickly embraced by the marketplace has been around for over 8 or 9 years. And after all these years, especially measured in IT-years, you would think this technology would have become more mature and be easier to implement by now.

The bottom line – It has not. Many ECM projects have failed with millions (maybe billions!) of dollars sitting on the shelf collecting dust or being thrown in the trash for the promise of another “better” ECM package.This Blog will focus on how to effectively use ECM technology to solve business problems and try to debunk some of the myths out there. Other goals include:

• Exploring the next generation of ECM technologies – I will talk more about this later…
• Watching the IT infrastructure giants; Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and EMC to see if they can really can deliver on ECM for the masses
• To discuss the changes in the software application buy vs. build paradigm
• Sharing my experiences with the next generations of these ECM tools including some of the recent open source entrants like Alfresco
• Sharing some of my ideas about where the ECM market is headed, test some of my hypothesis’ on my visitors, and to get your feedback
• Let everyone know what I learn at conferences, in meetings with clients, Analysts, and with many of the leading ECM vendors

I hope this Blog becomes a useful resource and a place where we can share lessons learned, discover new opportunities to make implementing ECM easier, and have some fun. More to come…