Industrial Trends
 Gartner, the renowned research and advisory firm, has rebranded the term enterprise content management (ECM), and replaced it with content services. |
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According to Gartner’s December 2016 report, Reinventing ECM: Introducing Content Services Platforms and Applications, content services are “a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.”
We believe, in other words, that the focus of content services is to solve multiple business process challenges with multiple integrated solutions throughout the enterprise.
But what types of solutions are included within the content services methodology?
In the same report, Gartner breaks down content services into three categories:
- Content services platforms
- Content services applications
- Content services components
- Who is storing and processing the content?
- How can a unified content strategy can help those individuals work more efficiently?
- What additional technologies can be integrated with the centralized storage platform in order to achieve business goals?
The transformation from ECM to content services denotes an important conceptual shift away from the “management” of content and too much focus on the repository as the solution. Redefining the market as content services recognizes that it is no longer strictly about the storage of content for the enterprise, but rather about the consideration of how content is used by individuals and teams — internally and externally — to create, collaborate, share, transform, and leverage that content in business processes and to gain insight. This transformation will be a multiyear evolution in many organizations, and reflects a change in requirements from buyers, affecting several markets.”
The content services approach, we believe, looks beyond the consideration of where content is being stored and focuses on other important questions, such as:
Ultimately, ECM and content services seek to achieve the same goals, but they each take a different approach in doing so.
While content services uses a combination of strategy and integrated technology to achieve these goals, ECM aims to achieve them with a single system.
Whether your organization uses the content services approach to improve operations or swears by a philosophy of centralization, it can gain valuable perspective by taking each of these methodologies into account.
