ECM: Are Content Management Standards Possible?

The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) lacks a well-adopted industry-wide set of standards. Actually they lack standards that have achieved almost any sort of acceptance. That’s a problem.

Within enterprises, Content Management solutions often start as departmental projects and tend to be point solutions. While the goal of ECM is to span the enterprise, in reality, what happens frequently, is that enterprises end up with a collection of incompatible point content management solutions. To fully share information across the enterprise, data needs to be able to flow easily between all these systems. But how can all the many point solution dots be connected?

Life would be a lot simpler if the point solutions were based on ECM standards. Standards that would allow a plug and play compatibility between systems. It sounds good, and while things have gotten marginally better over the last few years towards the creation of standards, we’re still a long way away from realizing standardization. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of forces working against ECM standards.

A major problem is the complexity of ECM. AIIM, for example, the “ECM Association”, makes a business out of continually trying to describe the components of ECM in colorful “compact” poster-size drawings. If ECM were easy there wouldn’t need to be the annual redrawing of the poster to show the interconnections and relations among the many pieces. Coming to a consensus on the “right” way or “best” way to approach ECM is difficult.

That’s not to say that people are not trying. JSR-170 and JSR-283 standards in the Java community that have achieved a modest amount of interest, although limited to the Java language. To date, the biggest and most prominent adopters of this technology have been in the Open Source world, and there among vendors with very small market share. There is also the work being done by AIIM on the fairly low-profile interoperable ECM standard.

In general, the large successful ECM companies, that could make standards a reality if they were to throw their weight behind them, see no benefit in loosening the grip of their proprietary technologies. So ECM standards really haven’t gone anywhere.
The British Standards Institute (BSI) has recently decided that the lack of standards is a problem and they will create their own standard for ECM. BSI plans to create a best practice specification and a frame of reference for the entire ECM industry. But rather than create their own, it seems that a better solution might be to try to collaborate with AIIM’s iECM or to try to bring other standards bodies together in working on what is a very difficult problem. Going it alone against something that has eluded standardization for so long will be a difficult task.