The conspicuous absence of ECM at Enterprise 2.0

As regular readers are no doubt aware, I spent a good part of last week catching up on all things Enterprise 2.0 at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. For a subject that deals with a significant amount of content, there was a dearth of ECM presence here this year. Other than Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) SharePoint (which was here to publicize its E20 chops) and a couple of open source representatives--Cheryl McKinnon, CMO at Nuxeo and John Newton, CTO at Alfresco--as far as I could tell, everyone else stayed away.

All that chatter is content

Last year, I remember EMC and Open Text came for a visit, but not so this year. When you think about Enterprise 2.0 activity, whether it's microblogging, status updates or blog posts; it's all content and as the sheer amount of this content grows over time, it begs to be managed. That’s why I found the absence of ECM vendors more than a bit curious. They could really make a case for themselves at a conference like this.

What to keep?

Much like email, Enterprise 2.0 content could build up quickly, especially in a large company. Regulated industries (and everyone else) may need help deciding what to keep, what to archive and what to toss. And how do you find those nuggets of information inside the mountain of inane chatter that most won’t care about? It takes a sophisticated system to handle this type of activity. You would think ECM would be screaming from the rafters that their tools should be managing this content, yet they weren’t.

Is this a search problem?

Sid Probstein, CTO at search vendor Attivio was here and he was genuinely excited about the possibilities and opportunities that Enterprise 2.0 present. He sees search tools like his as a way to get at underlying information such as who is an expert in a certain subject based on their social activity. He says content like blog posts is actually much more structured than you imagine, and Attivio search technology can get at this information and find answers to individual questions locked inside the Enterprise 2.0 information stream.

Is ECM giving up on E20?

What’s interesting is that last year, ECM vendors were at the conference, but they weren't talking about content management per se. Instead, they were discussing their own E20 offerings and how they were equipped to deal with E20 functionality and manage the resulting content, the way they always have inside the CMS. It’s hard to believe they have given up on this space, especially as I wrote last week (in The attack of the big Enterprise 2.0 Vendors) that larger vendors like IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) are suddenly in this space in a big way. It leaves me wondering why ECM vendors aren’t in there competing hard for that revenue.

When is ECM going to wake up and recognize an opportunity that’s obviously staring them in the face? That these vendors decided en masse to take this show off is surprising and it makes me wonder if the industry is giving up on E20. But with such obvious connections, it’s just hard to believe that would be the case. If they haven't given up, they better get back in the game...before it’s too late. - Ron