Reading tech writing blogs recently, I can’t help but notice that “content strategy” is currently a very popular topic.  But the more I read about it, the more I am reminded about “enterprise content management” (ECM), a term that was in vogue around 2004 to 2007.  Indeed, Ann Rockley uses the term “unified content strategy” frequently in her book on Enterprise Content Management.  I see a lot of the same concepts and phrases being thrown around ( “content silos”) that Rockley uses in her book.    And it’s difficult not to notice that some of the articles most frequently cited when defining content strategy (such as The Discipline of Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson and Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data by Rachel Lovinger) were written as even as ECM was going out of vogue.

What I saw at the ECM Revolution

When ECM was in vogue, I was working for a company that produced a content management system (CMS).  Most CMSs at the time had been developed to manage and deliver web content.  Most CM systems did this well.

When ECM came into vogue, CMS companies began driving to do several things:

• Develop compatibility and interfaces to  other products subsumed under the ECM rubric, such as digital asset management (DAM) and records management.  Companies began negotiating alliances and development teams dedicated time and resources to developing these interfaces.

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• Add functionality to address missing capability in the product.  In particular, CMS developers began to add print document management capability to their CMS.  When developers with a web mindset tried to develop interfaces to manage print documents (where order is as important as hierarchy), the result could be…interesting.  Indeed, in some cases, the results were practically unusable.

Then, suddenly, around 2007, ECM went out of vogue.  Most CMS developers began emphasizing their web bona fides, sometimes labeling their products specifically as web content management (WCM) in a specific effort to distance themselves from ECM.

What Happened to ECM?

Like the revolutions of 1848, the ECM vogue was “a turning point at which history failed to turn”.  It failed to turn for two reasons, one obvious and not uncommon, the other more subtle and potentially troubling.

The ECM vogue, as is so often the case, was driven by market analysts, who were telling the vendors of CMS, DAM, and other types of software, that customers were demanding enterprise content management capability, while telling customers that they needed this capability and that it would solve all of their problems.  (I’d love to see a study of the role that market analysts play in creating and driving trends like this; I’m sure it would be very informative.  Perhaps it’s already been written and I don’t know about it.  If so, I’d love to find out.)

It did not take customers long to realize they had been oversold, that the ECM tools they were buying were not solving all of their problems (and often created new and different set of headaches in and of themselves).  Once customers began realizing ECM tools have been oversold, the whole concept lost credibility, and customers no longer wanted to hear the term.

Which leads to the second reason “history failed to turn”.  ECM is not simply a set of capabilities and tools.  You couldn’t get ECM simply buying the right tools because ECM required a cultural change more than a change of tools.  Content silos do not exist simply because of incompatible tools (although incompatible tools  aggravate the problem).  Content silos exist because different organizations in a company compete as often as they cooperate, sometimes more often than they cooperate.  Organizations compete for resources, control, political capital; competition is a fundamental characteristic of the corporate milieu.

The Upshot

ECM, content strategy, call it what you will, can only work, can only be successful, in an atmosphere of cooperation, not competition.  Engendering this atmosphere requires a radical change in corporate culture, a change that is alien to corporate culture and can only be driven from the top.  Only when executive leadership sees the value in cooperating to create and maintain content will they foster and enforce the cooperative culture fundamental to the very function of ECM or content strategy.

As I see it, the advocates of content strategy (or ECM) face a threefold challenge:

• The first, and possibly easiest, is to themselves recognize  the shift in corporate culture inherent in the very concept of content strategy/ECM.  Only when they recognize the need for a cultural shift can they begin develop strategies to bring about the cultural change, and begin to generate real value from a coherent strategy for managing content across an organization.
• Develop strategies strategies to bring about the changes in corporate culture required to implement content strategy/ECM, and thus return real value from the practice.
• Execute those strategies to convince corporate executives that content strategy/ECM has real value, enough value that it’s worth their effort, often the hassle and headache, to make and enforce the cultural changes required to implement content strategy/ECM successfully.  This is the most tricky of the three to realize, but without it, I don’t see content strategy/ECM going anywhere.