A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post called "Let's free WCM from the shackles of ECM." An anonymous comment in reaction suggested that data was data and it didn't matter much what kind of content it served up. On one level that's a completely valid statement, but any company worth its salt in the content management game long ago mastered the database management side of things. What separates products is what they present to end users in the trenches, in terms of content creation and content access.

The whole presentation issue is a problem that content management vendors have been struggling with for years and still haven't quite solved. We still hear about clumsy interfaces and obtuse workflows. We still hear complaints that all of this stuff is still way too hard and that content management is still out of reach for most but the hard-core technical end users.

If that's true, and I believe to a large extent it is, how do we move beyond that? Maybe we have to start thinking about this as a series of smaller problems, rather than treating it as one big one. And that was kind of the point of the editor's corner on differentiating web content management from the generic enterprise variety. Content management has to be less about data and more about doing a job, and it may be time to break down ECM even further into smaller tasks.

Even so-called ECM vendors are beginning to recognize that. Hence the forays into case management that began last year in earnest, because data may be data, but the power of that data comes into play when we recognize that someone has an actual job to do. Case management, as Lee Dallas pointed out in his guest post last year, is a reaction to lack of traction for pure content management. He wrote:

Beyond commoditization the vendors are challenged by an increasing lack of tolerance for ambiguity. Selling common base platforms had once been a very effective strategy but technology buyers in general are becoming less inclined to invest in abstract functional capabilities.

But it's not as simple as saying: We should design products for end users instead of IT, because both of these groups have legitimate needs. IT needs to be able to connect the content management tools to other enterprise systems to take advantage of that data. End users need simplicity and elegance. Can we have both?

Perhaps we can, but it's probably going to take more than one solution to make that happen. ECM vendors have always loved to shove everything under that one umbrella term, and why not? It's a nice, neat little marketing message to be all things to all people, but it's not necessarily realistic.

What we need is not exactly a revelation, but it's the right tool for the job. Instead of thinking in terms of one uber-system to rule them all, we need to get more solutions-oriented with tools that are easier to use. We need interfaces that are easy to understand and we need to access our content wherever we are, delivered to the right device in the correct screen resolution in the right context for the job.

And it's time to recognize that it may require a smörgåsbord of solutions to achieve that. Some vendors will be better at creation, some at management and some at delivery. While we all acknowledge that data may be data, we still need a variety of solutions in our content management tool boxes to take maximum advantage of that data and really put it to work. - Ron