If you’re looking to understand the direction of the enterprise content management (ECM) industry, and the skills that employers will be looking for as they seek to wrestle their unstructured content management issues to the mat–you’ll want to be in Chicago for this event.

Regardless of how the ECM profession comes to be defined and evolve, however, I’m going to give you a little tip, one which both the IT and business sides of companies should have tattooed on their forearms: technology, including ECM, will NOT SOLVE your business problem. You’ve got to understand the business first, THEN apply technology to it. Too often, there is confusion between ECM as strategy and ECM as technology. It’s both. But strategy first; technology second.

ECM: An Evolving Profession
“A first step in standardizing education in the ECM industry has been taken by AIIM through our certificate programs,” explains Atle Skjekkeland, AIIM Vice President. “Obtaining a Practitioner, Specialist or Master designation in any one of our six core programs (Enterprise Content Management, Electronic Records Management, Email Management, Information Organization and Access, Business Process Management, and Enterprise 2.0) makes you well-prepared to address the multiple challenges posed by unmanaged content. In fact, we are now seeing the AIIM designations used to differentiate staff in job postings, resumes, and proposals.”

Emerging Sub-specialties and Job Titles?
Much like one can be an “IT professional” focused on a discrete aspect of the overall information technology industry, ECM professionals also need to focus on specific skills within the ECM space (capture, search, ediscovery, email management, etc.—and note that these focus areas and skill sets will and do overlap). As a consequence, the term “ECM” may well evolve into multiple others. Both Joyce Osborn, president of Document Management Solutions and vice president of the AIIM Chicago Chapter, and Stacey Cripps, ECM practice leader at Catalyst Search Group (joint organizers of the event), point to “enterprise information management (EIM)” as a possible emerging term. As Cripps points out, “User organizations view ECM as a toolkit, while they feel EIM is more suited to full-scale implementations.”

“ECM,” as Osborne notes, is probably still too broad. Organizations, in addition to wanting ECM/IT professionals who understand the technology, are also looking at expertise within specific verticals. Cripps adds, “Web content management is often viewed as a separate discipline. The growth areas are library management, taxonomy building, and deep understanding of business processes...we find that a weak area in organizations.” What Roles and Skills are Hot? While companies may not be looking for an “ECM specialist” by name, they ARE looking for the skills that such a specialist possesses.

What roles and skills are hot?
Cripps compiled the following from a number of conversations: “The focus will be on the business process practitioner, information architecture, and legal ediscovery response team. IT professionals need to have a combination of information management and industry experience to understand the user perspective. Business analysts in healthcare are now being called ‘change managers’ or ‘change agents’ and are gathering business requirements around solutions.”

Want to understand what role and skills you need to be a part of the solution? Join us in Chicago.

Bryant Duhon is editor of Infonomics Weekly and with Infonomics.