If ECMs are content graveyards, why are we here?

Last week, Laurence Hart (who is the newly-anointed chief technology officer at AIIM) wrote a post on his Word of Pie blog about a debate he had with a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) employee on Twitter. They were arguing about whether Documentum or SharePoint was the bigger content graveyard.

You can click through and read about the debate--or at least Hart's view of it. The post got me thinking, if they're right, and legacy content management systems are simply content graveyards, what the heck are we doing here?

Seriously, if content management systems from Microsoft, EMC, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), Open Text and other so-called legacy vendors are installed at a high price, and content gets saved and never retrieved, and that's the end of the process, it's a depressing testimonial on what I cover for a living, isn't it?

It's also pretty damn cynical.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the post is that there is undoubtedly some truth to it. Surely, these big systems are expensive, cumbersome and difficult to install and maintain. What's more, the process of saving and extracting content from an enterprise content management system--let's leave web content management out of the discussion for this one--can be difficult.

If the express purpose of managing content is to be able to take advantage of that existing content, then making it easy to save, extract and share that content has to be Job One for these systems.

Perhaps that's why cloud content management vendors like Box.net whose goals are to combine enterprise class functionality with the ease of use of consumer cloud tools is growing so quickly. Box.net certainly has some missing pieces to this point, but it is clear that it takes the installation piece out of the equation and makes it easier for end users to save and share content--which clearly the big vendors can't claim in total.

Yet, as one IT pro pointed out to me last week, what companies like EMC and IBM have going for them is a trust factor. Through years of building relationships in IT, these big vendors have a leg up on upstarts like Box. But if it's true as Hart asserted in his post that these vendors (at least EMC and Microsoft) have failed in their stated goals to manage the content effectively, why would these IT folks continue to buy from them?

Perhaps it's because, the debate was less about legacy vendors and content management graveyards, and more about document silos, the dreaded concept of storing content in a place where only a few people have access to it. When content gets locked in silos, those outside the silo are effectively locked out, making that content as good as dead for them.

I'm not so sure cloud solutions in and of themselves can change that. Hart nailed the essence of the problem when he wrote, "The real point is that it is important to use your content in processes and collaboratively. If you just store it away, it is a cost, not an asset. This is true regardless of the systems in play."

And that notion of reusing content is one that every content management vendor should strive to achieve. Putting all the complexity aside for a moment, it all comes down to that basic idea, that content has value, and if you can extract that value, you achieved a major goal of the content management system.

Conversely, if you're failing to do that, why are you in this business? - Ron