One on One with Kathleen Reidy of the 451 Group

Kathleen Reidy is an analyst at the 451 Group [1] covering content management and collaboration technologies. She has nearly a decade of experience in the content management, portal and search industries including time as an independent consultant and writer. She has also held positions at Sun Microsystems and the Giga Group. We asked Reidy about the role of social media in content management and how well content management vendors were handling incorporating social media tools in their products.

FCM: Where does social media fit in content management?

KR: It depends how you are defining it, terminology in this area is still quite confusing. I generally think of social media as an organization's efforts to use social technologies (blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc.) for marketing purposes. But that is only one aspect of a broader social software landscape or one application in Enterprise 2.0--or however you want to label it.

As far as content management goes, the most relevant part of all this is how user-generated content is incorporated into content management efforts. There are several aspects to this. The first, and I think the one that is the most fundamentally different from the way we have done things before, is opening up websites for external contributions. From a technology perspective, this requires both the addition of new product features in WCM but also, in some case, changes to architectures to support external content contributions. Social software can also help in content creation processes for content that is created internally but eventually published externally.

On internal sites, social technologies also have a role and this also ties to content management. This is both an evolution of Intranets but also a continuation of team collaboration and groupware-type environments that some organizations have used for a long time. Pulling these together, so that the Intranet can become the collaborative environment is the shift.

FCM: How well are web content management vendors equipped to deal with social media tools?

KR: This is new for most of them. Most WCM systems were designed to manage content creation that is then pushed out for consumption. Some don't even sit in the delivery tier at all. So there's no one answer as to how well WCM vendors can handle social content. A few have built or acquired technologies for full-fledged social software--to run stand-alone community sites or to incorporate some social features (e.g., tagging, ranking, commenting) into an existing site. Others have added a few basic features or support the inclusion of an external blog, for example.

Social media is itself a shift for WCM vendors though, and your question is really about how well the vendors are equipped to deal with it. I think, as a whole, the WCM sector has been a bit slow adjusting to the changes social software has brought to the market and vendors now find customers with myriad of blogs, wikis and/or community sites running independently from their main .com sites run by WCM products. There's potentially an opportunity to help organizations rationalize and consolidate this, but it does require a shift for WCM vendors to be able to help customers with social media efforts. Community moderation and strategic consulting around social media issues are things customers can get from pure social software vendors and WCM vendors will need to decide how far they go in these areas.

FCM: What advantages/disadvantages do content management vendors have over stand-alone social media tool vendors?

KR: Tying social software efforts to content management tools could enable organizations to better control that content, ensure it is published to all relevant locations, run through workflow if appropriate and ultimately tied to archival or compliance efforts. But the social features from WCM vendors specifically, as noted above, vary a good deal and by and large aren't as mature as what you'll find in stand-alone tools. And, also as noted, some social software vendors offer fully outsourced community management services in SaaS models.

But the answer to this question really depends on how you're defining social media. There's a lot of blurring between content management and social media, particularly when you're talking about large vendors like Microsoft and IBM that have products on both fronts. Microsoft SharePoint is a good example--not as a product you'd use for an external website, but for an internal site that requires some basic content management, portal capabilities and some social software (something that will likely get much stronger in Microsoft SharePoint 2010). It isn't always an either-or discussion, it depends on the specific use case.

FCM: What do you see as the major differences between web content management and enterprise content management?

KR: There was a time when we thought web content would just be another content type an ECM system could manage. In fact, that's true, most large ECM systems can certainly manage web content. But they're not well equipped to handle all the intricacies of building and deploying websites. So WCM has really remained a distinct discipline within the broader ECM landscape. I think today, when we talk about ECM, we're usually talking about transactional content management--imaging and document-based systems meant to manage specific business processes (e.g., a loan origination or processing an insurance claim).

ECM these days is also very much about what some are calling 'information governance.' How do we manage all our unstructured information (including email) over time, so that we keep what we need for compliance, we delete what we don't need to reduce costs and risks, and we can cost-effectively and efficiently retrieve what we need for eDiscovery? Policies like these need to address web content, but it doesn't mean that the web content needs to be managed by a single system. Nor is web content the primary pain point in these areas (email is, followed by unmanaged docs on file servers and desktops).

FCM: What do you see as the next big trend in web content management?

KR: Wow, there are so many. I still think we're in the early stages of where we'll ultimately get in terms of usability. Lots of vendors are making some nice innovations in this area. We've not moved as far from the IT bottlenecks in web publishing as WCM was originally meant to and there's still room for improvement there. I think a continued improvement in the area of social software is part of this--making the internal creation process easier to use and more easily collaborative, as well as letting external users easily contribute content as well.

I also think business models are shifting, in the enterprise software market as a whole of course, but also specifically in content management. Open source options are becoming much more viable in content management and we have a number of European open source vendors coming to the US market lately. I also think SaaS options will continue to grow. In general, the market remains fragmented with lots of players serving different tiers of the market and different verticals and niches. And this remains the case, even after all the consolidation we've seen so far this year.