A proposed standard for Enterprise Content Management

Last week I went to a seminar on the proposed BSI Publicly Available Specification (PAS) on Enterprise Content Management (ECM).  The seminar, at the Online Information Exhibition, was given by Ben Richmond, author of  the proposed standard and CEO of The Content Group

Some writers have expressed concern that this is a vendor driven standard.  There are two user representatives on the steering group for the standard (Paul Finnis of Credit Suisse and Roger Wyer of Richmond upon Thames Council) but the rest of the steering group are system vendors, system integrators and consultants.  

I can't see how an ECM standard could be anything other than vendor dominated: after all ECM is a vendor created concept.  ECM is essentially a cobbling together a disperate set of document related technologies (document management, workflow, collaboration, web publishing, records management).  It does not stem from a desire of organisations to obtain all of this from one vendor, rather it comes from a desire of system vendors to sell as much as they can to each of their clients.  

The standard aims to provide a best practice methodology for organisations implementing ECM.  It defines ECM as 'a framework of technologies and practices working in an integrated fashion to manage information'. 

Ben characterised ECMs as focusing on unstructured information, rather than the data you find in databases.  I am not sure how long we should hold onto that distinction. In my experience those implementations of SharePoint that have been most succesful have been the ones that leveraged the value of data from their databases by bringing it into the collaborative environment where people can see it and do things with it.  I am thinking of two simple examples:

• Esher College integrating their college timetabling system with SharePoint so that any change to the time or location of a lecture was automatically fed through to the SharePoint mysite of the students and lecturer due to participate in it.     

• TLMI integrating their project management database into SharePoint so that metadata about a project is automatically added to documents saved to that project; and so that an aggregated view can be provided of all documents arising from a project regardless of the particular teamsite they were saved into. 

Ben Richmond says that the purpose of ECM is to cut across silos. He placed great emphasis on the word integration:

• if a system just covers one aspect of content management (for example it just manages your web content ) then it is not an ECM system.
• If an implementation is confined to one department or area then it is not an ECM implementation.

Ben described the best practice methodology outlined in PAS 89 . PAS 89 has come up with nine categories to encompass all document related taks.  These categories are:

• Creation
• Capture
• Management
• Processing
• Collaboration
• Distribution
• Publishing
• Reporting
• Storage

Ben said that the methodology in the PAS will advise organisations to take the following steps before implementing ECM:

• think through how your users would carry out each of the nine tasks in the ECM environment.
• develop policies and strategies around ECM.
• develop a metadata model, identifying what metadata they need, and how they will capture it in the ECM 

The methodology sounded very corporate centric, based on a high degree of corporate planning.   This is at odds with the general move towards environments that are customisable to team and individual taste. This move is evidenced by the phenomenal take up of web 2.0 applications, the low take up of corporate fileplans in the EDRM/ECM space, and the rapid rise of SharePoint - an ECM that lacks strong corporate classification and governance functionality.

Here is a quote from a speech by Gartner Vice-President Yvonne Genovese.  Genovese identified four overarching trends reshaping how IT is used in the workplace, and said:

“Most current software is focused on general enterprise needs rather than user-specific needs, The opportunity for business and IT leaders is to understand how the individualization of work will affect businesses, critical processes, innovation and interenterprise collaboration. End-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and service acquisitions made by IT.”

The BSI PAS on ECM is currently out for public review.

(Thank you to @metataxis for the reference to the Yvonne Genovese talk)

 

Comments

[aircraft and leasing]

Though I agree in part with your concerns - I think in fairness we also need to recognize that ECM in terms of standards.I am in the middle of writing our ECM Report for standardization in late December.Nice post!