ECM in a mess?

Another week, another trade show. It's a lonely existence, living off dry press room sandwiches and free vendor-branded Gummi bears handed out on the stands by women not wearing very much. Alright, it's not all that bad, events like Internet World are not only valuable for lead-generation from a vendor perspective, but the keynote speakers can illuminate some interesting themes.

While most of the crowd gravitated to keynotes by MySpace, Mozilla, Google and other such cool names, I found myself in a darkened corner of the ECM theatre where Alan Pelz-Sharpe of analyst CMS Watch explained why the current enterprise content management space is "a mess". A lot of the blame was laid at the feet of the vendors, and to an extent it should be – although the technology is as mature as it's ever been, many vendors can be guilty of over-hype in this space, and creating a siloed view of the market which leaves many customers confused.

So what's new, you might ask? Well, probably more than most industries, ECM can be a minefield for the uninitiated buyer, partly because there are at least ten or more components to an ECM solution, any one of which or combination could, and usually is, touted as a holistic ECM solution. Problem is they're not. Case in point: SharePoint – it may be a great collaborative tool and has the user community well onside, but it's not a "proper" ECM product really, is it now?

Well, this is all very well and good but IT buyers have got to take some of the responsibility too. If they take the time to understand where vendors' strengths lie, what kind of customers the vendor has had before and in what sectors, and if they draw up a list of priorities – what they will need the technology to do – then they will be starting out on the right foot. Organisations also need to pay more attention on the relationships they form with their vendors, said Pelz-Sharpe, demanding who they will actually be working with on implementation for example.

Elsewhere, Ben Richmond, founder of consultancy The Content Group said end users need to work towards a best practice guideline for ECM. This would involve defining the term, developing and implementing a strategy and then creating a means to continually measure its effectiveness. Best practices around ECM are few and far between, and given the buyer confusion that leads to most projects failing, they would be a welcome addition.