The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
ECM and Content Services: Vendors Rebrand as Industry Focus Changes
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was first defined in 2005 by AIIM and the industry stuck with it for more than a decade. But in 2017, both Gartner and AIIM tried to come up with a new name for this space that describes what ECM has evolved into.
AIIM called it Intelligent Information Management (IIM)., and Gartner called it “Content Services.” In Michael Woodbridge‘s blog for Gartner, he said that “ECM is now dead (kaput, finite, an ex-market name), at least in how Gartner defines the market. It’s been replaced by the term Content Services, a strategic concept that covers three aspects, namely Content Services Applications, Platforms and Components. ”
So far, between the two names, Gartner seems to have had the biggest effect on vendor branding. Vendors like Alfresco, Oracle and Microsoft have all begun rebranding their software under the banner of “Content Services”.
Gartner said that “the transformation from ECM to content services denotes an important conceptual shift away from the “management” of content and too much focus on the repository as the solution. Redefining the market as content services recognizes that it is no longer strictly about the storage of content for the enterprise, but rather about the consideration of how content is used by individuals and teams — internally and externally — to create, collaborate, share, transform, and leverage that content in business processes and to gain insight.”
John Mancini, AIIM Chief Evangelist, said that “it doesn’t matter what we call it [ECM]. It matters how customers use it.”
Let me just clarify that, according to AIIM, the two terms are not mutually exclusive. Content Services refers to the technologies and Intelligent Information Management describes the practice or methodologies.
There are a lot of ‘services’ around content, so moving up to the term ‘contentservices’ seems legit. Classification and deduplication, mapping of attributes, rule management and reporting — All of these help you to develop a content roadmap and project plan that support your digital transformation.