Business Process – the Future of ECM

This is a blog post that summarizes the presentation I delivered on March 19 at the AIIM Conference 2015. The link to the presentation slides on SlideShare is included below.

For years, enterprise content management (ECM) solutions were adopted primarily for two main use cases. The first was to achieve compliance, and many early adopters of ECM continue to successfully use it to address various regulatory requirements. Compliance provided functionality for records management, archiving, and information governance. A while back I wrote a blog post titled What Features Ensure Compliance? that elaborates on the functionality required for compliance use cases.

The second use case was around team effectiveness with functionality such as collaboration, document sharing, and social capabilities. Collaboration is subject to frequent changes in direction as every new technology promises an easier and more compelling user experience—from mobility and social software to file sync-and-share. The frequent feature churn in the collaborative use cases doesn’t go well with the compliance requirements that often need the system to remain unchanged for several years (validated environments, anyone?).

ROI and Dependency on the User
Not only were the two primary use cases not really well aligned in their feature requirements, they had two additional challenges. Neither use case provides a very strong ROI. Sure, we marketers always calculate the savings in storage and government fines that compliance solutions help you avoid. But let’s face it: preventing penalties is not exactly a hard ROI and storage is cheap (or at least everybody thinks it is). The collaborative use cases are even worse—measuring the ROI here is fuzzy at best and often impossible.

The second challenge was the dependency on the users to do the right thing. For the compliance use cases, users were expected to diligently file their documents, weed out their inboxes, type in the metadata, and apply the right retention policies. Obviously, users are not very consistent at it, even if you try to force them. In the case of collaboration, users were expected to share their documents openly with others, comment in a productive way, and stay away from email and all the other collaboration tools around them. As it turns out, this type of behavior very much depends on the culture of the team—it works for some, but it will never work for others. The adoption of any collaboration solution is therefore usually very tribal.

So, is there any hope for ECM? Can we get an ROI and get employees to use it without someone watching over their shoulder?

ECM: Part of the Process
As it turns out, there is a third type of use case emerging. It is the use of ECM as part of a business process. Business processes are something people already do—we don’t have to force anyone. That’s what companies and working in them is all about: everything we do is part of a business process. Business processes are also important, relevant, and very measurable. There is an ROI behind every business process. Every instance of a business process includes the context, which can be used to populate the metadata and to select the right policy automatically. Business processes can handle the automation of content management and don’t have to rely on the end user to do it.

But business processes don’t live in ECM. Sure, the process artifacts usually reside in a content repository, but it would be a stretch to claim that the entire business process happens in an ECM application. Nor does it live in the BPM application, even if that application may be the primary application for some users. In fact, there is usually a master application from the structured data world that rules the business process: enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain management (SCM), etc.

That’s why it is important for ECM to connect with the master applications through the business process. This is not just a simple way to link data sets or to hand over data from one system to another. Using modern, REST-based technology, it is possible to achieve integration that goes much deeper and involves users, roles, permissions, classifications, and of course the user experience.

Deal with Content Chaos
ECM addresses some very important problems that every organization has to deal with. Given the volume and relentless growth of content in every enterprise, it has to be managed. Yet ECM struggled to be adopted widely because of lack of tangible ROI and a difficulty to attract end users. Tying ECM to a business process through a master application addresses these challenges. It may not solve every problem with content in the enterprise and there will still be content outside of any business process, but it will go a long way to dealing with what AIIM calls “Content Chaos”.

Business Process - the Future of ECM from Lubor Ptacek

My 2014 Predictions Scorecard

Just like every year, I review my predictions from last January and publicly score how well I did. After all, predicting the future without accountability is something only a futurist would do. Futurist is a cool job if you can get it. It’s fun just like a historian, except you can’t be confronted with any actual facts. Well, I’m not a futurist and so this is how I did:

1.     Big Data shifts to Big Content

I predicted that the industry would get tired of talking about ‘big data’ and that we would start looking for insights coming from ‘big content’, large volumes of unstructured data. Well, this has really happened, even if the term itself isn’t used much. The media got tired of ‘big data’ and replaced it pretty early on in 2014 with new buzzwords such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and – yes! – Analytics. Analytics refer to the ability to get insight from unstructured data, in contrast to Business Intelligence (BI), which is primarily focused on structured data. Ever heard of IBM Watson? Well, that’s all about analyzing large volumes of content.

Score: 1 out of 1

2.     ECM stays

I predicted that the term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) will survive another year unscathed, even though many voices will keep calling for its demise. Not only has ECM survived, I find that it’s stronger than in the last couple of years. Many of the vendors from adjacent industries such as Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) and Capture are reinventing themselves as ECM wannabes. As the market is consolidating, the term ECM seems to be one of the constants.

Score: 2 out of 2

3.     BPM market looking for direction

I predicted that the BPM market would continue looking for a something new. It still is. I was at the Gartner BPM Summit just a couple of weeks ago and among the 20-30 sponsors, hardly anyone stood out with their ability to differentiate. I have further predicted that BPM will become a feature of other solutions. That hasn’t exactly happened yet, even though I have not seen many BPM deployments lately that didn’t involve a repository and one or more core applications. Yet the BPM market remains solidly an independent market for now and I can only give myself half of a point here.

Score: 2.5 out of 3

4.     Digital marketing meets compliance

I have predicted that amid the consumer security and privacy pressures, marketers will start paying more attention to information governance and data security. I was completely wrong on this one. While there has been a security breach story every week through 2014, still nobody cares about consumer privacy and data security. The last of all who will ever care are apparently the marketing departments. #Fail.

Score: 2.5 out of 4

5.     Mobile market

I’ve predicted that not much will happen in the mobile market with iOS and Android keeping their massive share while Blackberry remains stagnant. I have also predicted, though, that Microsoft will enjoy a substantial adoption of their Surface tablets, reaching 10% share of the tablet market. Why did I ever make a quantifiable and verifiable prediction? The market stayed about the same, with Apple and Google far ahead of anyone else. The Surface gained a lot of adoption and I see a whole bunch of them now when I travel. Yet, its market share according to Statista was only 5.7% in Q3/2014 - not quite enough for 10%. Still, I think that I deserve half of a point here!

Score: 3 out of 5

6.     Spying will continue

I predicted that we wouldn’t see any material changes in legislation or any proof that the NSA would change any of their data collection practices as a result of the Snowden leaks. Indeed, nothing changed. We have moved on, accepting the spying the same way as we have accepted security controls at airports. Life sucks a little more but not enough to take it to the streets.

Score: 4 out of 6

7.     Data privacy will become the new code of business conduct

Yes, yes, yes. This has happened. As I have predicted, many companies started putting their employees through mandatory security and data privacy training classes. Just like in the case of the code of business conduct training, the primary goal is to reduce corporate liability rather than to address the actual problem - which may or may not be even possible. Anyway, I call it progress towards security awareness and get a point here.

Score: 5 out 7

8.     The end of corporate social software

I’ve predicted that most companies will give up on building a generic social water cooler and that they will simply replace social software with file sync and share. This happened – since sharing files is apparently the highest level of collaboration most employees are willing to endure. I’m not sure anyone even mentioned enterprise social software at all in 2014. Pure play vendors continue disappearing with some of the once-leaders going through major shake-ups including CEO replacements (i.e. Jive) and company re-branding (i.e. Newsgator – now Sitrion).  Just like I have predicted, social software became a feature. What’s even more interesting is that the traditional collaboration software and – gasp – e-mail are going through a renaissance with a new breed of solutions such as Google Inbox and IBM Verse.

Score: 6 out of 8

9.     Cloud will go through a reality check

2014 has become a year of reality check for cloud software vendors. The big event that I predicted would come was Box when they filed their now fabled S1 document with the SEC. The filing exposed an alarming and widely unexpected disregard for profitability. The market gasped in unison and Box was forced to postpone their IPO indefinitely and we haven’t seen any other cloud vendors rushing to disclose their numbers. As a result, things have certainly cooled off a bit on the venture-funding front and people are all of the sudden asking those pesky questions about monetization, cash flow, and (oh dear!) profits. That said, we haven’t seen an actual failure of a cloud vendor and nobody is worried about viability of any of the cloud vendors who are now safe-guarding our corporate data. So in all fairness, I don’t deserve a full point on this one.

Score: 6.5 out of 9

10. Cars will beat wearable devices

I’ve predicted that wearable devices would not be a big hit in 2014. That has happened – Google has effectively killed its once-hyped Glass, Apple failed to ship the Apple Watch (though I still want one), Nike did something stupid with the FuelBand and not much new happened otherwise. That said, I have also predicted that more attention would be paid to the user experience in our cars, which didn’t happen at all. While everyone continues drooling about the Tesla, nothing new happened in the auto sector, not even at Tesla. That’s too bad because most car manufacturers still believe that better user experience means dark wood interior trim… I will have to stretch the rules to give myself half of a point here. But then again, I’m doing the scoring so why not, right?

Score: 7 out of 10

With 7 out of 10 points, my predictions weren’t particularly good. Some of them were obvious, some didn’t happen. The greatest disappointment in 2014, albeit one that I predicted, was the lack of advances in data security. The problem is becoming dire and yet nobody cares. This has to be the greatest problem to be solved right now – and I am not sure it will be solved anytime soon. The one prediction that I have missed completely was the Internet of Things (IoT), which is where most of the innovation occurred. With the IoT, home automation is becoming reality at a reasonable price, which is very exciting. Other than the IoT and the re-invigoration of email, 2014 was kind of a slow year.

We’ll see what happens in 2015!

My Content Management Predictions for 2014

It’s the first week of January and that means it’s time for my annual predictions for the content management industry. If you have followed my previous predictions or my blog, you know that I take a bit wider view of ECM (enterprise content management). So my predictions span a broader - albeit very relevant - spectrum of technologies. So here they are, my 2014 predictions:

 

1. Big Data shifts to Big Content
In 2013, ‘Big Data’ seemed to be the universal answer to all problems. Do you want to sell more? Use Big Data! Want to spend less? Use Big Data! Looking for a solution for the Middle East conflict? You guessed it - it’s Big Data! All year long, I have been answering questions about Big Data from which I have concluded that none of us really know what we are talking about. It’s clearly time to move on and I predict that we will move on in 2014 and latch on to a different buzzword.

I also predict that we will hear quite a bit about the Big Content problem in 2014. That is a very real problem to solve - as most of our information resides in the content files and all of them are a mess, starting with your digital photos and iTunes library - all the way to your sales library. Cleaning up that mess automatically is the goal of the Big Content solutions and this will be one of the big trends in 2014.

2. ECM stays
The debate about the future of ECM has been raging over the last years. Many consider the term obsolete or at least tired and believe that it doesn’t capture some of the new hip technologies such as social media, cloud computing, and mobility. Since the term ECM was coined back in 2001 (with many self-proclaimed authors), it has to stand only for a traditional, boring, on-premises software. Right? Basically, ECM is dead and it has to be replaced by a new term.

Well, my prediction is that while the calls for its demise will continue, ECM will live happily on through 2014. Sure, there are some issues with the definition of ECM. Just look at Gartner - the ECM Magic Quadrant attributes significant score to adjacent technologies such as BPM (22% of the ECM score) and WCM (7%), which actually have their own magic quadrants. Yet the WCM Magic Quadrant pays no attention to ECM and the BPM Magic Quadrant doesn’t attribute any score to even having a content repository.

The bottom line is - ECM will be around and well by the end of 2014.

3. BPM market looking for direction
Mentioning BPM, I have another prediction. I consider BPM so highly adjacent to ECM that it is probably one and the same - but that’s yet another topic of a discussion for a later blog post. My prediction is that the BPM market will continue to look for a future direction. Little has happened in the last few years. At the core of BPM is the ability to analyze and optimize business processes, to orchestrate them, to integrate with other systems, to monitor their status, and to analyze the process activity across a period of time.

Well, everyone is doing that. Sure, there has been a lot of talk about leveraging some of the new trends such as social collaboration, mobility, and the cloud but let’s face it - every software does that by now. Not much has happened since the last true innovative thought which was case management. Even the analysts have been struggling to articulate innovation by introducing concepts such as Intelligent BPM Systems (iBPMS) and Smart Process Applications. Those are compelling discussions but they don’t really introduce much in terms of technology innovation. Instead, these concepts basically package existing technologies into a larger bucket.

I predict that BPM will continue looking for a new direction in 2014, without finding it. In the longer term (beyond 2014), BPM technologies will become a feature of other software including ECM, ERP, CRM, etc.

4. Digital marketing meets compliance
In the customer experience management (CEM) market, which is another market highly adjacent to ECM, we have been very focused on digital marketing this year. Indeed, the ability to provide a targeted and compelling experience across any communication channel combined with integration to the marketing back-end systems such as Marketing Automation Management and Customer Relationship Management is very compelling.

Yet the more personalized we want to get, the more personal data we have to use. Using personal data for marketing purposes raises all kinds of privacy and security concerns and it will be more and more subject to regulations. We will see that the digital marketing discussion will increasingly include compliance concerns and compliance will become a standard part of the digital marketing feature set in 2014.

5. Mobile market
My annual prediction for the mobile market introduces a perhaps unexpected turn from all my previous predictions. Sure, Google Android will continue dominating the market share as all the people still using feature phones will eventually upgrade to the cheapest smartphones which all happen to run Android. Apple iOS will continue making a killing on revenue and margin and will be pushing the envelope on innovation. BlackBerry is going nowhere.

But the surprise will come from Microsoft. No, it won’t be the Nokia phones, which still offer little over their iOS and Android counterparts, but the tablets will start getting meaningful traction. I predict that 10% of the tablets selling by the end of 2014 will have the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system (or whatever number will be current at the time). The idea of a tablet that is the same as a laptop is simply too compelling and many will upgrade their laptops to a Surface or a similar Windows 8 tablet.

6. Spying will continue
The NSA spying will continue. FBI, CIA, and police will join in on the fun. We will all be upset for a day or two, post flaming notes on Twitter and Facebook and then we will go and focus on the playoffs. There will be a high profile case again - something of the Wikileaks or Edward Snowden proportion and the media will write about it for a few days, until Kobe or Angelina offer more “important” news.

Spying will continue and we will not change our behavior as consumers in 2014.

7. Data privacy will become the new code of business conduct
Our employers, however, will act upon the backlash from privacy issues. The lawyers and HR will translate it into a new set of corporate policies and mandatory employee training classes. These measures will serve, as so often, to protect the organization from a rogue you. Should you go Snowden and start letting the world onto corporate secrets, you have done it on your own and your company has the right to declare you crazy.

That will also create an interesting dilemma for the whistleblower policies - which are ironically required by law today. We will see companies trying to limit the whistleblower freedom. After all, Edward Snowden could be seen as a whistleblower...or traitor - depending on where you stand on the issue. All in all, we will lose more data privacy in the enterprise in 2014, even though it will be a big topic.

8. The end of corporate social software
There is more to making a company social than just deploying social software. No amount of software will help when the organization fails to create a culture of sharing. If employees didn’t share their ideas, insights, and knowledge before the deployment of social software, they are not going to do it just because we have put a piece of software in front of them. In most organizations, “knowledge is power” and that concept is contrary to what social software is supposed to accomplish in the enterprise. The new corporate attitudes towards information security and data privacy I’ve described in my previous point won’t help either.

My prediction is that most companies will give up on building the generic “Facebook for the enterprise”. They will move on and lose interest in social platforms. Most likely, they will replace their social projects with file sharing and synchronization which coincidentally also promotes a culture of sharing. But sharing a file is much easier for most people than sharing a thought. Social software won’t go away completely. There are some legitimate uses, mostly as part of a specific application. But in this scenario, there is a clear focus and the community of people involved is coming together for a specific purpose. Social software will become a feature.

9. Cloud will go through a reality check
Cloud-based software is becoming hugely popular - to the point that many are predicting a quick demise of traditional on-premises software. While I consider enterprise cloud software hugely beneficial to the customers, I am not quite convinced that it is a sustainable business model for many of the vendors. I see over-hyped startups going through one round of financing after another – clearly operating at a deficit. I see the big public companies, Salesforce, NetSuite, and Workday, all operating at a loss. I see companies like Microsoft pouring billions into their cloud efforts with little to show for it.

In 2014, I expect that we will see a couple of enterprise cloud failures on a high scale. Some enterprise cloud companies will fail, they will be forced to scale back their offering, or they will have to raise their prices drastically and face the market’s backlash. Cloud customers will start asking questions about viability again.

10. Cars will beat wearable devices
In 2013, everybody got excited about wearable computing devices and yet not much happened. Google Glass became an overpriced prototype, Apple failed to release the iWatch, and while Fitbit is cool, it doesn’t do much. My Garmin watch is still way ahead as the most sophisticated wearable device with a practical use.

The wearable devices will continue to evolve in 2014, but I predict the emergence of another class of devices – devices for cars. I recently bought a new family car after many years and one of the big selling features was “Bluetooth” for – well, just about everything. But let me tell you, this is not the Apple experience. This is more like SAP running on a mainframe emulator back in 1990. That will change and quickly. In 2014, we will see the first mass production cars (read: not Tesla or Ferrari) to release interfaces that will seamlessly connect with our mobile device. The car manufacturers will also start releasing sophisticated apps that will handle everything from the car’s entertainment, navigation, and climate control to maintenance status. Tesla is showing the way with their new app.

So that’s it. These are my predictions for 2014. I will review them in December and assess my score – just like I did in previous years.

Until then – Happy New Year!  

What Features Ensure Compliance?

I hear the word ‘compliance’ tossed around all the time but I suspect that many of those using the word only have a very vague idea about what it means. Compliance usually refers to the adherence to the rules that have been imposed upon you by the law or some type of regulatory body. But what technical capabilities are required to actually comply with such legal and regulatory requirements?

First, let’s be clear. You don’t use the word compliance when you are referring to something that you really want to do. Compliance usually means an inconvenience that you are required to do. It rarely saves you time or money. However, compliance is designed to protect you from failure, from disruption, from poor quality, from wrong decisions, from danger, from injury, and - if you live in America you’ve probably guessed it - from lawsuits. Various parties may be interested in protecting you from all of those risks. It could be a consumer safety regulator (i.e. the FDA in the pharma industry), your government (federal, state, or local), or your employer. But how does that actually work?

First, compliance often means to assure that proper authorization is in place for important decision making. That starts with access control - making sure that the right people have access to pertinent information at the right time. That usually involves a dose of security - preventing any unauthorized actor from manipulating the information or the decisions.

The decisions themselves are often required to be documented in a non-repudiable way. This is where electronic signatures come in. Unlike digital signatures which deal with mimicking the paper-based ‘wet signature’ in a digital form, e-signatures are all about capturing who, when, what and why. Electronic signatures are simply a data object with name, date, and brief justification that become attached to a version of a document. When someone changes the document version, the e-signature is invalidated. “I didn’t sign off on this version of the medication packaging” is what e-signatures are all about in the pharma industry’s FDA’s CFR 21 Part 11 regulation.

Other compliance requirements, such as Six Sigma and the various ISO customer service quality standards, ask to ensure that certain mandatory process steps are completed before the process can advance to the next stage. This is where technologies such as workflow  and BPM come in - workflow for processes where all steps occur within a single system and BPM for processes that cross multiple systems.

At the end of any process, many regulations require that all the artifacts are stored as proof in case of a potential audit or lawsuit. That’s the role of archiving and of course also records management. Records management not only stores the required information for a prescribed period of time, it also classifies the records to assign them a retention policy that specifies how long the record is to be kept and what should happen with it when the retention expires. Records management also deals with requirements such as legal holds (pausing of any record shredding during a lawsuit) and secure records disposal to prevent forensic recovery.

Finally, many regulations require the ability to trace back any steps for the purposes of an audit or investigation of an incident. This is where auditing comes in with the ability to record a timestamp for every event in an audit trail and the ability to easily review and analyze the audit trail.

There are many other capabilities that may be part of a compliance solution. The specific regulations drive the requirements. Beyond access control, e-signatures, workflow/BPM, archiving, records management, and auditing, compliance requirements may include search, publishing, secure communication, collaboration, and many other capabilities. Records management has been receiving plenty of attention lately; so much that many equate compliance to records management. Yet there is much more to compliance than records  which is what I wanted to show in this post.

Seven Types of Content Applications

The enterprise content management (ECM) industry has been talking about content applications for many years. A while back, Gartner coined the term “composite content applications” while Forrester talks about “content-centric applications”. What I mean are applications that primarily deal with unstructured data (content) rather than structured data applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and product lifecycle management (PLM).

We all can usually come up with many examples of such applications but, to my knowledge, they have never been properly classified. What are the types of content applications out there? Sure, Forrester introduced new categories for ECM in their groundbreaking report Transactional, Business, and Persuasive Content: A Better Way to Look at Enterprise Content back in 2005. But that was really dealing with the different technologies rather than the application types. So, I decided to give it a shot myself. I would love to get your help with it, though. Please do comment if you agree or disagree and if you can think of applications that don’t fit into my categories.

Before I start, I should make it clear that while all the application types below use content as the primary data type, they go beyond ECM. They also involve business process management (BPM), customer experience management (CEM), and discovery. At the same time, I am not trying to cover all BPM or CEM applications, but rather only those that use content. For instance, I am not including straight-through processing (STP) applications in BPM such as payment transactions or capital markets transactions because those don’t use content. Basically, I am categorizing applications that span the enterprise information management (EIM) space, as we define it at OpenText. So, here are the seven types of content applications:

1. Productivity Applications
I’ve labeled the first group ‘productivity applications’ because they are all aimed at increasing employee productivity, which is sometimes very difficult to measure. These applications usually involve sharing business documents, sifting through vast volumes of information, collaborative authoring, document libraries, and collaboration/social software as a means of improving employee communication and effectiveness.

Examples of such applications include corporate policy libraries, knowledge management, contracts management, idea management, etc. These applications are often considered part of the knowledge worker infrastructure as they require relatively little customization and they are typically not department specific or industry specific. IT usually selects and owns these applications.

2. Compliance Applications
Compliance applications are the bread and butter of the ECM industry. They are addressing the requirements for regulatory compliance and corporate information governance, and they are reducing the legal risks related to content used as possible evidence in a court of law. These applications focus on access control, auditing, information retention, and mandated tasks, approvals, and sign-offs.

Examples of such applications include records management, legal discovery (eDiscovery) and early case assessment, as well as many regulated document applications used to address specific requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as well as self-imposed requirements such as Six-Sigma or ISO 14001. Such applications are almost always function or industry specific, i.e. applications dealing with the FDA 21 CFR Part 11 regulations in life sciences, the OSHA material safety data sheets in chemical process manufacturing, or the Dodd-Frank Act in financial services. A wide variety of functions can be selecting and owning such applications, although the heavily regulated industries often have a Chief Compliance Officer while companies in highly litigious industries lean strongly on the Chief Legal Counsel here.

3. Process Applications
There is a group of applications that are very process-oriented, and yet they depend heavily on content as the information used for decisions that determine the process routing, tasks, and results. Such applications usually involve electronic forms and the capture of incoming paper documents. They also take advantage of process modeling and analysis, process simulation and optimization, rules engines, and process engines as well as process reporting and analytics. Frequently, the process applications integrate with other applications such as ERP and CRM.

Examples include invoice processing (a.k.a. accounts payable), travel expense management, and many vertical applications such as engineering change orders, dispute resolution, and authorization for expenditure. Usually, the process applications have an easily measurable ROI. These solutions are typically selected and owned by their respective functions and can span both the core and the supporting functions of the organization.

4. Case Management Applications
Case management came about as an use case of BPM but it deals with quite different types of applications. Gartner believes that case management is just a use case of BPM while Forrester declared case management a separate market - and a very fast growing one too. The case management applications are different from traditional BPM applications as they don’t just use content as a payload - they are much more about the content. They typically involve a case file which is a smart repository container accommodating many content assets and the logic governing their use. Besides a stronger dependence on a content management repository, case management applications can include many of the process application technologies for all the big and small processes required to manage the case file.  

Examples of case management applications include customer onboarding, employee file management, and fraud investigation. Vertical case management applications include insurance claims processing, loan origination, legal case management, and patient care management. The selection and ownership of case management applications falls - just like the process applications - onto respective corporate functions.

5. Resource Management Applications
Resource management applications are, as my label suggests, managing various resources - from human resources to customers and suppliers, from products to plant assets. These applications are frequently used in tight integration with structured data applications such as ERP, PLM, or CRM. The main purpose of these applications is to systematically organize large volumes of content assets that often need to be retrieved very quickly based on a complex set of metadata - i.e., all material with a warranty expiring in the next 30 days found in a specific geographic location. The resource management applications need to accommodate a rich variety of content formats: from documents and images, to CAD drawings and digital X-rays.

Examples of resource management applications include customer information management, product information management, plant asset management as well as vertical applications such as patient records, and legal matter management. The resource management applications are selected and owned by the responsible function in the organization (line of business).

6. Go-to-Market Applications
As the name suggests, these sales and marketing applications are used to support the organization’s go-to-market efforts. Their main job is to capture attention, persuasively convey a message and solicit a desired call to action. They typically involve rich media assets, multi-channel delivery of content, social engagement and the need to measure and monitor their effectiveness. The sales and marketing applications also need to account for geographic differences - from language, local examples, and local trends, to different customs, ways of conducting business, and customer privacy laws.

Examples include digital marketing, e-commerce, marketing libraries, marketing campaign management, sales collateral libraries, and virtual pitch books. While there are vertical flavors to such applications (i.e., the pharma companies have to add some compliance capabilities to their digital marketing), the go-to-market applications are applicable across industries. They are almost always purchased and owned by the sales and marketing departments.

7. Publishing Applications
I use the label ‘publishing applications’ for all types of applications where content is the actual product or a product component. The published product can come in many formats and increasingly multiple formats are being combined into a single final product. For example, books are now typically published on paper (hard and soft cover), for consumption in different e-readers (at least three formats are necessary: Kindle, iBooks, PDF), and as an audiobook. Increasingly, the content delivery needs to take in account the consumption device with its screen size, resolution, and bandwidth. Although the products are becoming more consistent worldwide, translation, localization and distribution rights are a major factor here.

Examples of such applications include technical publishing, catalog publishing, different types of media publishing (i.e., book publishing, magazine publishing, motion picture and video production), radio and television programming, and learning material publishing. Even non-corporate blogs like the ones published on WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr fall into this category, although many of them are used in the consumer domain outside the scope of ECM. The buyers of such solutions are almost always the heads of the publishing production who often carry different titles depending on the industry.

So, that’s it. These are the seven types of content applications. Before anyone brings it up, I do realize that many of these applications started reaching across the categories. In regulated industries, pretty much every application has to include compliance. You can make an argument that BPM should be included in everything. Same for collaboration or social software. But what decides the categorization is the original goal for deploying the application. Are we deploying the application to handle more customer requests and compliance just happens to be a required feature? Then it is primarily a process application rather than a compliance application. The primary stakeholder is usually the telltale too. Different owners have a different purpose for their application, which usually determines the type of solution they will select.

While this is my view of the landscape, I would love to hear from you. Do you agree with my categories? Do you see any other categories or a different way of categorization? Have you encountered any applications that don’t fit? Please share your comments and help me make it better. If there are substantial changes as a result of your comments, I will publish an updated version of this post.

Thank you!