ECM under the hammer again

A few weeks ago, (or was it months, well, time flies in IT journalism) I wrote about enterprise content management and the need for a more accurate term to describe the myriad technologies that are so frequently lumped in under the one banner. Alan Pelz-Sharpe of independent analyst firm CMS Watch and Ben Richmond of consultancy The Content Group both argued that the term is confusing for buyers as it misleads them into believing an ECM product can truly meet all their "content management" needs. The problem, of course, is that ECM can be used to mean anything from records or document management to email management and business process management.
Well, now web content management firm Interwoven has added to the clamour, as vice president of Emea, James Murray, told me the other day that the term needs to be "exploded". By that I think I don't think he meant packed with dynamite and semtex, covered with paraffin and then set light to. No, rather he meant broken down into its individual elements. It's hard not to agree with this argument - while there is a certain responsibility on the part of the customer or IT buyer to do their research and shop around etc, the vendors up until now have not made it easy by taking such a siloed approach to ECM.
Talk to EMC Documentum about content management solutions and you'll get a very different idea about what they're capable of than if you went to OpenText, for example, or Alfresco. It's heartening in a way that Interwoven also wants clarification on the term, although I guess it's going to benefit a firm primarily in the WCM space, as they are, to clear up this confusion. There is also a perception that WCM is like content management for the web, but it really isn't. As Murray told me, it's now more about consumer behaviour - giving your customers what they want and creating good web experiences. Ultimately this is going to increase revenue, and it could be the smallest change to a site that enables this.
Interwoven has been a bit ahead of the game then in snapping up web optimisation firm Optimost last year. The firm specialises in technology that allows multi-variant testing; ultimately this enables marketing dudes to make a number of choices about how they want a site to look and feel, and then see how successful each variation would be - taking the guess work out of the whole process.