One of the questions I am asked most often is, “What comes after ECM?”
Almost a decde ago, AIIM was at the center of creating and popularizing the term “Enterprise Content Management,” or “ECM” to describe our industry.
Almost since the day we first started using it, people have asked me whether there isn’t some better term to describe what we do. My usual response is that ECM isn’t perfect, but it’s better than any alternative.
The risks of hopping off to the latest technology fad were highlighted for me during my first few years at AIIM, not long after we started talking about ECM.
At the time, there were many who were urging us to make “Knowledge Management,” or “KM,” the center of what we do. Many consultants told us “documents are dead” and urged us to hop on the KM bandwagon. Many of you have probably heard the story – I don’t even know if it was actually true, or just AIIM “urban legend” – of the “Knowledge Management Scanner” that appeared at the AIIM Show. I must admit that we were tempted.
I will always remember the moment I realized that this was truly an awful idea.
I was invited to be on a panel at a KM conference at the Holiday Inn in Silver Spring, just down the road from the office. The first sign of danger – “Warning Will Robinson!” – was when my fellow panelist introduced himself as a “Cultural Epistemologist.”
Now I will admit to not always being the sharpest tool in the shed, but usually when I am on a panel with someone, I at least have an idea of what they actually do for a living.
During the panel discussion, there seemed nary a mention of documents or processes or images or anything that I was even remotely acquainted with. “Cultural epistemologist” had me stumped. The closest I could come up with was a term that I vaguely remembered in conjunction with natural childbirth training when my wife was expecting our first child.
So now you know the real reason why AIIM never became “The Knowledge Management Association.” KM for me was the original “piece of the elephant” term; you could get endlessly different definitions depending on which piece of the elephant the respondent was holding.
We find our industry now approaching another “identity crossroads.” Consolidation has swept through the industry. The big infrastructure players are in the game. Sharepoint has reportedly crossed the $800M revenue mark and has been deployed to over 85 million seats. “ECM” as we know it is clearly in the process of becoming something very different and something much bigger.
This month, we will launch two new training programs in areas linked to ECM – Business Process Management (BPM) and Information Organization and Access, or IOA.
The BPM Certificate Program will cover the following topics:
• Requirements gathering and analysis
• Application integration
• Process design and modelling
• Monitoring and process analysis
• Streamlining and re-engineering processes
• Managing change
The IOA Certificate Program is focused on helping organizations optimize findability and enterprise search and will cover such concepts and technologies as:
• Enterprise search
• Developing and manage a taxonomy
• Content classification, categorization and clustering
• Fact and entity extraction
• Information presentation
I am not sure where all this will wind up in terms of an industry label – we would welcome your thoughts – but I can tell you that we are expanding the reach of the Association.
Our mission in this effort is to push two principles that were missing from the KM debate. First, we are focusing on developing a consistent and standard set of definitions and approaches to dealing with BPM and IOA. We want to help put some boundaries around these areas and make them actionable for end users. Secondly, we will look at these technologies from a practical rather than theoretical perspective.
Our focus will reflect the approach we have always tried to take at AIIM – not technology for technology’s sake, but technology to achieve a business objective.
BPM and IOA – coming to an AIIM venue near you. Sign up now. Recovering Cultural Epistemologists welcome.
FYI, I will be doing a webinar on Tuesday, October 2nd (12 noon eastern time) with Blake Donley from Great River Energy. Registration details are at THIS LINK.
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