ECM: Forrester's Four Content Types

Businesses need to deal with four types of content:

Transactional — content that typically originates external to the enterprise from customers and partners.  Transactional content is typically related to a business process and often is a central part of a business workflow.

Business— content that is essential to the running of day-to-day business activities.  This type of content is frequently contained in emails and office documents.  It includes reports, presentations and spreadsheets.

Persuasive — content that is generated to influence external audiences.  This kind of content is used in marketing, customer self-service, ecommerce and lead generation.  Web content management and eCommerce content also fall under this category type.

Foundational — content that cuts across more than one of the above three categories.

At least those are the four categories of ECM that Forrester Research identifies in a report called Plan Your ECM Strategy for Business, Persuasive, Transactional, and Foundational Needs.  The idea is that people are too focused on thinking that they need to use a document management system for managing office documents, a web content management ecommerce and online content, and a records management system for managing corporate records.  People should develop content management systems based more on the use case for how the content will be used.

Maybe it is just me, but I don’t see what’s wrong with using a document management system for managing office documents and a records management system for dealing with records.  I can’t see how people w0uld say “let’s put that powerpoint in our Persuasive content system rather than into our Business system — or, on second thought, it really it should be in a Foundational system because it really has both persuasive and business elements.”

Steven Powers, principal author of the Forrester report, said that “Don’t be afraid that you might have to source specialized technology for a specific need.  You may have one ECM vendor that supports foundational [content] plus one or two other types. … Our clients don’t generally have a single ECM suite in place, and there’s no need to have a goal of having a single ECM suite.”

Centralizing all content into a single repository is often an impossibility that at many large companies may not be worth the effort of pursuing.  Most ECM systems are not deployed on an enterprise-wide basis but by department, project or team.  The report recommends companies to not worry that much should they decide to use multiple systems for managing their content.