Once we’ve got over the extremely poor pun on the Shamen single from way back I’ve finally got round to catching up following an extremely busy period at work. Its only fair that I give an account to see how I got to where I am now.
1. I was interested in doing some research on what people out there are doing on Content Management Strategy, note the E is not good here, so I did a search on Google. The results were dominated by articles and sites which were really WCM but promoted as CM. I made a comment on this through Twitter and got a response back from Cheryl Mckinnon. If you don’t follow her I would recommend it.
2. Something reminded me that during the past few weeks there had been a discussion on ECM and CM, and Pie had been involved. I was right and I read Pie’s post about it.
3. This in turn led me to Peter’s post on the Case for Killing “ECM”. I posted a quick comment and Peter has asked for a clarification of why I think the E is needed.
So here I am, and the answer is in point 1. For too many people CM = WCM, they only consider the Web as part of their Content Management approach. We need something which gives a strong differential between WCM and its superset and I am afraid CM just does not work. I think it could have done but the misunderstanding is too ingrained into the minds of the industry that a re-education to help people think wider than WCM would not work.
So what should we use then? Well I don’t see harm in using Enterprise but there are disadvantages to it too, notably the Enterprise then restricts the view of content to that Enterprise…unless you can successfully define the Enterprise in which the Content is to be created/captured/managed/stored/archived. If someone can come up with a better alternative then post here but for me dropping the E is not good. CM on its own and leads to too much misunderstanding.
Observing Content Management 