As principal of Bock & Company and an affiliate analyst at Outsell's Gilbane Group, Geoff Bock focuses on strategies for content management and collaboration. Bock has been watching the content management industry for many years and has authored hundreds of papers, case studies and articles focusing on content management issues. We asked him some questions about the current state of the content management industry. 

FCM: We talked about case management at EMC World. Where do you see case management fitting into ECM and do you think it's a good approach to ECM marketing and packaging?

GB: More than simply marketing and packaging, I think case management is a good example of a content-driven enterprise application, developed for a familiar, document-centric infrastructure. Many formal business processes today depend on documents. We need good ways to collect and manage them. We need a moniker to describe this kind of document-level capture, review and approval application. Case management is a pretty good term, and ranks alongside ERP and CRM as a type of enterprise application.

But case management, per se, only automates business processes, and does little to add intelligence to the processing. It's a good way to keep things organized and efficient which, especially in large enterprises, is a big problem. Nevertheless, people are still required to open the documents and act upon the information that they contain. 

FCM: Speaking of ECM, there has been talk (including from me) that it's a term that has outlived its usefulness because no one company has the chops to do it all well. Do you think it's time to move on from ECM?

GB: Hardly. Since when must one company 'do it all well' in order to validate a category? Rather, we are in the midst of a digital tsunami--the content explosion is only getting worse. As a product category, I think that ECM is more important than ever before. ECM represents the collection of technologies that are useful for managing electronic documents, images, rich media and many other types of content (including information snippets that are now an integral part of micro-blogging).

However, it is also important to realize that enterprises don't simply 'manage content' in the abstract. Rather, they are concerned about the business purposes for focused solutions--reducing costs, improving outcomes and mitigating risks. Good solutions often require content technologies produced by multiple vendors, including open source communities. As ECM technologies mature, standardized capabilities and interfaces are going to become increasingly important.

FCM: Another big topic lately has been the place of web content management in the ECM stack. Do you think it belongs there or on a separate track?

GB: I'm not sure if we advance the state of the art for content solutions by debating whether there's a separate track or a bigger stack. Certainly there's a tendency to view ECM as being more 'document centric,' and to position WCM as being more 'web-publishing' centric. But the boundaries are permeable and shifting. 

We often overlook the fact that ECM, at its core, revolves around storing content and managing metadata--initially at the document level and now more and more at the content component level. And today, WCM is much more than the page-oriented publishing applications from the early days of the web. 

To my way of thinking, a good solution provides both a flexible framework and an extensible collection of tools and resources for developing content-centric applications. There's going to be a content technology stack that blends the key capabilities of ECM and WCM.

FCM: You've been looking a lot at XML content management, recently. Has it moved beyond the documentation department, and if so, how are companies using intelligent content?

GB: XML has moved a long way beyond the documentation department and its roots as a tagging syntax for semantic mark up and formatting. Together with colleagues at the Gilbane Group, I've just finished an in-depth research report on "Smart Content in the Enterprise: How Next Generation XML Applications Deliver New Value to Multiple Stakeholders." (Download a free copy of the report.) 

By smart content, we mean content that is granular at the appropriate level, semantically rich, useful across applications and meaningful for collaborative interaction. As part of our research, we've published a series of case studies, and examine the ways in which organizations leverage XML to develop content-centric applications. 

When XML documents are tagged with relevant metadata, application designers can manage the various types of metadata to deliver intuitive and highly relevant applications that solve business problems. Not only does smart content unlock the information stored in technical documents, but, as we describe in several case studies, sometimes a documentation group can transform itself from a cost center to a profit center.

FCM: Finally, I wrote recently about the role of APIs in sharing content. What role do you see APIs having as content management matures?

GB: There are many different types of APIs. Without getting too far into the application development goo, I think you have to be really precise about what the particular interfaces are designed to accomplish. Of course, CMIS is going to be important for an enterprise to integrate disparate content repositories. But it's not the only one. Rich and relevant APIs are a sure sign of application maturity, which we're currently seeing with ECM.

What fascinates me is the promise of smart and innovative applications that are now possible with content-centric APIs--for instance when semantic level metadata (tagged as XML) is exposed and available for mash-ups. I'm going to be able to share content in profoundly new ways. Consider what I can do with a Google mapping application. As a friend of mine describes, there is even an application where I can easily explore London in Dickensian time, charting the locations in Dickens' novels. Now just imagine what else I might learn if I could to integrate the street view photos from the nineteenth century into the experience.

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