As I was thinking about this week's column yesterday, it occurred to me that there has been a lot of good content management news lately. All signs to point to an industry that's on an upward trend. Even this week's devastating economic news is positive for ECM because Gartner is predicting [1] it will lead to more regulatory compliance laws similar to Sarbanes-Oxley. And that could mean companies will be looking for more efficient ways to manage their data.

When you combine this with the news about the CMIS content management standard I wrote about in last week's column [2] and several other pieces of information you have seen in this space, it's all looking mighty fine for ECM. In fact, I imagine that ECM executives could be having a hard time containing their enthusiasm these days about the future of their business. Let's take a closer look at why they might be feeling so upbeat.

CMIS
Perhaps the biggest factor that could push ECM forward is the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard [3] announced last week. As John Newton said in an interview [4] published in this week's newsletter, as the standard becomes more widely adopted it could result in "a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of tools, services and applications."

e-Discovery
With increasing demand for companies to produce old emails and other key pieces of information that could be part of a legal discovery process, e-Discovery tools gain more importance. We recently reported on a case [5] where Oracle got into trouble with a judge for failing to produce a key executive email as part of a stock holder litigation case. Requirements around e-Discovery are only likely to get more strict in the future.

Increased Regulatory Compliance
If Gartner's prediction comes to pass, and the recent economic meltdown on Wall Street leads to more regulation, it's going to put more pressure on companies to collect and manage key company data. Sarbanes-Oxley drove ECM growth in the earlier part of this decade. It's entirely likely that more stringent regulation will lead to an even greater role for ECM to store, manage and retrieve key pieces of financial data for organizations in the coming years.

Enterprise 2.0
Just this week, we reported on Yammer, [6] a Twitter-like micro-blogging tool for inside the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 drives collaboration and knowledge sharing, but it also creates another whole layer of content management issues, which involves generic content management, CMIS to share data across repositories, e-Discovery to find communications and files that surely will become part of the discovery process in the future, and governance (regulatory compliance) or rules around archiving information generated as part of the flow of Enterprise 2.0 applications and functionality.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)
As company's grow increasingly large collections of multimedia content assets, the need for digital asset management is going to grow. In fact, in a recent post covered a report from ABI research [7] that indicates that the Digital Asset Management, although small compared to the general ECM market, is still expected to reach $1B by 2013. 

All of these factors point to a growing and thriving content management industry. Whether this happens, of course, is subject to the vagaries of the economy, the industry and how well ECM companies can take advantage of these growing pain points inside organizations. One thing is certain: You are going to need content management service for an increasing number of activities in the future, and if ECM vendors come up with the solutions to help you, everyone is going to win. - Ron [8]