There is still room for growth in ECM

Dave Shuey has an interesting post this week called "ECM and the Mystical Triangle" on the ContentManagementConnection. He explains that the triangle is divided into three parts with the enterprise at the very top, mid-size business in the middle and small business at the bottom. Shuey makes some predictions based on his belief the enterprise market is saturated.

While I agree that there is more consolidation coming in the ECM market, I think it's a stretch to say that ECM is saturated. There is still plenty of room for growth on many levels, but chiefly the advent of social media just generates so much additional content that needs to be managed. This can come from your own employees or be user-generated contents from your customers (or even partners or suppliers).

The act of being social is itself content, and that too needs to be managed. All of the interactions that go on among employees internally and externally with others related to the organization all need to be harvested and managed and this doesn't even take into account the increasing amounts of content companies are dealing with. In fact, we are seeing an explosion in content and all of this needs to be managed.

So while I agree with some of Shuey's conclusions, including that there will be an attempt to move into the other parts of the triangle, I believe there is still room for growth at the enterprise level too because of all the content social media tools add to the repositories.

For more information:
- see Shuey's post [1] on ContentManagementConnection

Related Articles:
ECM and social media are not at odds [2]
Where ECM and Web 2.0 meet [3]
Which way will content management spending go? [4]