Guest post by Joe Shepley

Mobility, from a global perspective, is already one of the top two or three forces shaping technology in the twenty-first century. Given that, it's surprising that you don't hear more about mobile content management (MCM) from enterprise content management (ECM) vendors.

Maybe it's because they're focused on the repository and application layers of their products rather than the presentation layer, or maybe they've fully conceded the ECM front end to SharePoint, or maybe they're just not thinking creatively enough. Whatever the reason, in my opinion, mobility offers ECM vendors a significant opportunity not only to secure their long-term relevance but to differentiate themselves from competitors who may be slower to deliver effective MCM.

What I want to do in this post is to sketch out some of the broad outlines that I think will shape the MCM market over the next few years. There aren't a lot of MCM products out there at the moment, although there are some folks ramping up to play in this space, so I've got to fall back on prognostication, which, as a strategy consultant, I don't mind doing from time to time.

But first let's take a look at the market forces driving mobility toward center stage. 

Regional forces

In industrialized areas such as Europe, the United States and Japan, hand-held devices are nearly ubiquitous in the consumer and business markets. Of course, most business folks (and many consumers) have personal computers as well, so hand-held devices are often only one part of the end-user equation. The division of labor typically breaks out as follows:

• PCs - document creation and collaboration, working in LoB systems, surfing the web
• Hand helds - email, phone calls, light web surfing, text messaging/IM

As hand-held devices get more sophisticated, and as businesses move beyond RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) as the de facto standard for business hand-helds, surfing the web, document creation and collaboration will increasingly take place on hand helds as well, and we'll see PCs decline in importance. With the rapid adoption of non-RIM devices and tablets in the consumer market, this shift is already well underway in the private sector.

In other parts of the world (Africa, Central/South America, South Asia, etc.), however, hand-helds are frequently the only computing device in play for business and consumer users. The expense of PCs, the unreliability of the power grid, the low availability of wired Internet connections--all of these factors have come together to make hand-helds of central importance to the development of both the business and consumer computing markets in developing nations.

Global forces

But beyond these regional drivers, there are two global ones behind the rise of mobility.

First, there's the prevalence of mobile/virtual workforce models, which can't function without mobile technology. As the number of workers operating outside the confines of the office grows, so too will the central role of mobile to businesses.

Second, there's the increasingly global nature of business in general, whether because organizations are expanding beyond the borders of a single nation or because partner and supplier networks have long since ceased to respect national borders, or both. This further increases the importance of mobility to businesses across the board.

Let's turn now to look at what might be in store for MCM over the next few years.

The shape of mobile content management

The way I see it, the following four considerations are critical for thinking about MCM:

• Internal versus external users;
• Front-end versus standalone;
• Supported use-cases; and
• Enterprise risk.

Internal versus external users - For some organizations, MCM will be purely an internal play--to enable content management for employees on their hand held devices. For others, MCM will be external as well--to enable content management for customers, partners, and other external entities. 

Front-end versus stand-alone - Front-end MCM basically functions as a user interface to create, view, update and dispose of content in enterprise repositories and workflow applications as well as participate in activities managed in workflow applications. Standalone MCM, on the other hand, is a full-function tool that enables users to accomplish tasks independently from (or in loose parallel with) enterprise systems; the content generated may or may not be ported over to enterprise systems for long-term storage and management.

Supported use-cases - MCM applications will likely address a number of core business use cases:

• View - allow users read-only access to information;
• Create - allow users access to document management functionality (full read-write access);
• Collaborate - allow users access to content and tools for enterprise collaboration;
• Participate - allow users access to workflow applications so they can accomplish their assigned tasks, manage the tasks of others, and monitor, manage, and alter workflows they participate in; and
• Communicate - allow users access to enterprise communities.

Enterprise risk - Like anything worth doing, MCM poses risk to the organization, which we can plot along two dimensions: 

• Security - the risk that information or access to information systems will fall into the wrong hands; and
• Litigation - the risk that information will be retained beyond its legal/useful life and become needlessly discoverable.

What's interesting about these two categories of MCM risk is that they're mirror images of each other, as the following figure shows.

That is, looked at from the perspective of security risk, the sweet spot for MCM is standalone apps for external end users; but from the perspective of litigation risk, the sweet spot is front-end apps for internal end users. 

What this means is that organizations will have hard decisions to make about what kind of risk (and what level of it) they're willing to accept as they move to adopt MCM. It also might be one reason why more organizations haven't yet embraced MCM-they may be caught in the middle between maintaining information security and reducing litigation risk, and so IT is on the sidelines waiting to see which direction the company wants them to go.

The final word

That's my take on the importance of MCM and what the next few years might hold for the space. I've deliberately kept it vendor-neutral-maybe in a future post I can tackle how various players in the ECM space are addressing mobile.

But for now, I'd love to hear what folks out there think, not only about what I've presented here, but also about MCM more broadly: Did I miss use cases? Are there vendors out there you think are addressing MCM head on? Or maybe you think MCM is a red herring? 

Whatever the case, jump in, share your ideas, and let's get the conversation started!

Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) is a strategy consulting professional living and working in Chicago. In his current position as Vice President and Practice Leader at Doculabs he focuses on helping organizations improve how they manage information using technology and processes. He is a regular contributor to CMSWire and AIIM's Enterprise 2.0 Community and self-publishes two blogs: Agile ramblings and the intentional leader. You can also keep up with him on flavors.me and Twitter.

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