By Laurence Hart, Chief Information Officer at AIIM
July 28, 2011 - 3:47 PM
Today, AIIM hosted a tweet chat, tag #ECMJam, to discuss Content Management. Last time we focused on the Relevancy of ECM, but today we focused on the intersection of ECM and Social Media. While I wanted to wait and share my thoughts after the summary was posted, I thought I would share my thoughts now given the chaotic state of next week.
I’m going to use “Enterprise 2.0/E2.0” to represent the social business applications. Generally speaking, there is no one type of Enterprise 2.0 application. I personally view Enterprise 2.0 more of a technology driven evolution of collaboration. In general, I’m not dwelling on defining the fine lines between the new terms but outlining the relationship between Content Management and these new tools.
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What is ECM’s role in supporting social business? Simple, it provides the platform to help provide governance to Social Business and helps to cross the gap with the core of the business. This isn’t just governance and the control of content. Integration with a Content Management System provides access to broader sets of information from across the organization into the application in question.
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Collaboration is a key element of social business, where does ECM fit? There wasn’t a lot of controversy here. We essentially said that collaboration isn’t new and that Content Management’s fit is the same as in the past. Provides scale and improves reusability. I feel that for focused solutions or small volume systems, Content Management isn’t required. As you increase scale and the diversity of business problems being addressed, the need for an effective ECM strategy as part of your collaboration/E2.0 strategy becomes more critical.
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How important is governance for Enterprise 2.0? To oversimplify, are tweets records? To answer this question, answer an older question, Is every email a record? The answer is no. That is the same answer, for the same reasons, for content in E2.0 systems. Context, purpose, who creates the content, and the fickleness of the courts will impact the scope of the answer at any given time. Like email, most content from E2.0 systems is an explicit form of communication. If anything, that fact increases the odds that it is a record, making governance more important. Issue is that lots of social media interactions happen outside of established internal systems. Organizations need to catch it, assess it, and act appropriately. Content Management systems, along with analytics, can help with the volume.
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All things considered, how does ECM need to change in the E20 world? I believe very little needs to change. We might need some new data constructs, like when we created one for email, but the core features are dead-on. Content Management needs to scale, be open (e.g. CMIS), be more widely accessible, and needs new tools like analytics in order to sift through the massive volumes. Most of that is already here and would be coming without the advent of Social Media.
There are likely to be some follow-up posts as well (seriously!). In the meantime, continue to enjoy the summer and don’t forget that the next ECMJam is in two weeks. Tune in!
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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
