The Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Content
Management System (CMS) marketspace has almost a decade of history
behind it. Yet, the lack of true measurement, and specifically the
lack of identifiable success stories remains an enigma for the industry
at large.
However, the beginnings of practical data from real customers are
starting to surface. Recent studies have yielded some interesting
and surprising facts. Here are just a few highlights we found interesting:
• There is skepticism, especially among larger publishers,
about the ability of current crop of products to meet their needs,
especially for sole-sourced print and web publishing. This is indicative
of the general product void around “enterprise” content
management and ongoing integration needs for complete solutions.
• Those who spend more on their CMS solution are the least
satisfied with the current product landscape, while those who spend
less are the most satisfied. This might suggest that at least today,
it is mid-market buyers who experience the biggest mismatch between
expectations and results.
• Publishers tend to think that qualitative measures are more
important than quantitative metrics. They seem to know that they
need content management in the same way that they know they need
a telephone system – it is simply a requirement to do business.
Unfortunately, publishers tend to take a TCO (total cost of ownership)
approach, and not an ROI (return on investment) approach when purchasing
these systems.
It seems the problems content management buyers are experiencing
are largely driven by vendor misinformation and a habit of over-generalization
by the software peddlers on the street. There are many examples
of generic labels creating confusion and vendors pushing products
regardless of suitability (and in some cases, stability!) The labels
that the industry have conveniently adopted – Enterprise Content
Management (ECM); Content Management System (CMS); Digital Asset
Management (DAM), etc. – are especially suspect in propagating
confusion.
The variety of products that call themselves Enterprise Content
Management (and the overlaps between those products) is a larger
problem. For example, consider the business goals for Document Management
implementations and contrast them against those for Web Publishing.
Vendors from imaging, workflow, document management, change management,
knowledge management, records management, portal management, and
web publishing all label themselves “ECM.” They do it
because ECM is “saleable.”
Conceptually, “ECM” makes sense on three levels.
• Sharing content across an organization or via an Intranet
is surely a good thing.
• Moving content from “silos” into a master repository
or merged repositories can provide benefits for the enterprise as
a whole.
• Embracing standards across all content management projects
within an enterprise makes sense based on the benefits of those
standards: training, licensing, compatibility, and so on.
Unfortunately, there are flaws in those seemingly simple statements,
and this is where the practice of allowing software vendors define
your organization’s requirements gets dicey. keep
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