Just completed my tour through the most recent editions of the AIIM and MER conferences, and I am left with one question – what is the future of “content management”?
Perhaps I am stuck on the question as one of the final sessions I attended was focused on how an organization was able to gain control over unstructured content. The title caught my interest. Would they be discussing how to monitor the use of social media inside of their organizations? Perhaps strategies to address the use of applications like Snapchat? Maybe a forward looking discussion outlining the potential risks raised by the internet of things?
Nope. It was about driving adoption of an ECM system and an enterprise file sync and share (EFSS… a term from Gartner) system. And, they covered both of these technologies in one session. Whoa.
So, I sat and listened while I checked the status of my job postings on LinkedIn. Then replied to a colleague about a customer inquiry via Skype for Business. Then sent out a few tweets on the company Twitter account. Then responded to an IM from a customer about dinner that night. Then check the status of an opportunity in Salesforce.com via their mobile app. And, finally, I checked email when it hit me:
I may be in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time.
I am attempting to manage unstructured content right now and every day. And so is everyone else in my company. And very little of it is confined within an enterprise content management system, file share, or legacy email archive for that matter. Which leads me back to the question – what is the future of content management?
What the future is clearly not is existing on-premises enterprise content management systems that have not innovated themselves past the problems of low user adoption, high IT overhead, and the inability to address emerging content sources. For business process-centric content like loan origination and claims processing and other business records contained in documents – terrific. For everything else, the ECM concept appears to be headed down the same path as ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) and other marketing inspirations from technology vendors that did not address a true business problem.
The future also does not appear to be about the new generation of content channel providers (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Jabber, etc.) suddenly developing an appreciation, internal expertise, and technology capabilities to help organizations meet records management, information governance, retention policy, and vertically specific regulatory requirements. Even Microsoft itself has largely failed in development of robust records management facilities within SharePoint.
So, what does this mean? A world capable of supporting even more records and content management consultants? Perhaps, but I also believe that the definition and concept of content management will evolve – and must evolve. How so?
My belief is that the next generation of AIIMs, MERs, or ARMAs will continue to be relevant if:
- They address the reality of how organizations communicate and collaborate today, whether it be via social media, unified communications, IM, voice, or good old fashioned email;
- They address how organizations can extend their records management and information governance disciplines can address these new channels;
- The broaden the content management focus to showcase best practices on how organizations are managing the information risks that are unique to these emerging channels, including how to uncover the rogue channels that are in use without any current IT or records oversight;
- They rebalance the people-policy-technology equation to focus more energy on equipping companies with the tools that allow them to guide employees on the appropriate use of these emerging channels – and less on hosting vendor showcases
The change in employee communication patterns is happening now – and is irreversible. It is time for our notion of content management to evolve with it.
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