The New Role of ECM
The future of ECM. Have you contemplated it? Over the past year I’ve been traveling round the world, and I’ve spoken and worked with more ECM clients, and ECM professionals than I can count. Needless to say it would fill a dump truck.
I’ve always supported the notion that ECM is truest form is a platform on which to build applications. In 2002, I took this notion to its fullest extend and deployed an ECM suite within a global fortune 500 company. As I’ve continued my career in ECM, the major players have push this platform play to the fullest extend. They’ve always touted a feature and functionality list that is miles long and have sold on that premise alone.
The issue with this approach is that after the sale they leave a client with a bunch of software and with very little direction. Most of the clients I’ve worked with have left the software on the shelf, and ECM vendors have watched their support revenue dwindle after each renewal.
This level of shelf-ware has frustrated not just the ECM vendor but also their clients.
The interesting part of my career is to notice when the winds are changing. The premise for my role, is to leverage these platform plays into solving tangible business problems.
It used to be we’d focus on questions like:
- I need this workflow.
- I need this data to my internet site.
- I need this ECM application to do what ever.
Today however, we are seeing a change, clients are coming forward to the vendor to Answering questions like:
- How can I use ECM to improve productivity?
- How can I use technologies to solve the fact that I can’t find the right information and at the right time?
- What are the best practices to implementing a global solution?
- How can I leverage ECM as a differentiator to my clients?
During the past 18 months, one of the redeeming aspects of my job, is my ability to apply a framework and best practices, to get companies moving forward with their implementations.
This is a fundamental change however. The first set of questions represent the old way of doing business, where vendors are the order takers, looking to build what ever the client needs, or what the client thought they needed.
To today, where we are going in with all of the Intellectual Property, and best practices to lead clients to solutions that will help them differentiate themselves from their competitors .
This in it infancy represents where ECM vendors are going. We started with frameworks to not only enable global deployments, but also show where the ROI and value propositions come from. Now we are starting to see actual business solutions coming out of ECM vendors to address actual business problems.
Evolution of ECM
The illustration is only meant to represent how EMC’s Documentum suite has evolved overtime, and it shows that they are moving into the realm of solution based offerings. Their goal with the latest releases of their technology is to provide an xCelerated composition platform (xCP) that will allow organization to configure solutions to solve business problems.
The following is a youtube presentation regarding the merits of xCP and case base solutions.
Neville Letzerich Product Manager of xCP
The advent of xCP is a game changer in the realm of Enterprise Content Management. For the first time a major ECM vendor has turned their energy towards solving discrete business challenges. xCP represent the first phase of business solutions. It provides a rapid development platform to build out these solutions.
Next you will start to see partners and EMC devoting entire practices, with the intent to focus their IP with xCP to provide discrete business solution to their customers.
Tim
