Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the ongoing effort for an organization to use technology to organize their unstructured information and resources.

But I am still trying to tweek that last part “unstructured information and resources” seems a bit lame.

I’m going to address more about your comment in an upcoming post. I think we need to combine the comments and see where we are.

- Not sure I like practice. Vague and I don’t feel it captures strategy. I think a separate definition of ECM Platform and ECM Practice may be in order.

- We have to kill information resources. We are clearly managing content. A second sentence defining content may be in order.

- Still a big fan of a 1 sentence definition. ECM should be definable in a single thought, not a pair.

If we can’t explain it in a simple sentence, do we really understand it?

With ECM, the focus on unstructured content just doesn’t seem to make sense as organizations move a significant amount of their data from unstructured to structured. Will there always need to be strategies for dealing with unstructured? Absolutely, but the focus will shift away from unstructured and more toward being able to locate and use vast amounts of structured and semi-structured data more efficiently. As organizations store more knowledge in wikis, blogs, intranet applications, and knowledge bases, the nature of how information is stored in the enterprise will shift from unstructured to semi-structured+structured.

I have also questioned AIIMs contention that 80% of organizational data lies in unstructured data simply because email is considered unstructured. With changes coming in the way we communicate internally, email will shift from unstructured to semi-structured, and that 80% number will become less-accurate every day. Although not fully used by organizations now, technologies like GoogleWave and interactive “Facebook-like” intranets will start reshaping how our data is stored. Heck, 5 years ago, we would have been having this dialog via email, Google group, or list-serve. Now a semi-structured blog has become the vehicle…the proof of change lies in this very dialog. How many of these are occuring within the enterprise as well?

I, too, wrote a blog questioning whether the definition of ECM is becoming outdated and got a few interesting responses on my blog:

Is ECM Going The Way Of The Dodo? Or Maybe The Way Of The Intranet?
http://www.intranetexperience.com/ourblog/2009/12/has-ecm-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo-or-the-intranet/

Looking forward to reading more great responses!

–Sean
@seanrnicholson

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the practice of coordinated management of all content throughout an organization. It enables people and systems to access and manage information resources from within any business context using platform agnostic standards to achieve organizational goals.

I’m trying out the word practice as an embodiment of techniques, strategies, methods and maybe even tools. I had theory and practice initially, then dropped theory.

I hate (sorry Pie, some things you just gotta hate) the word facilitate so that just had to go. It doesn’t make the definition any clearer.

Then i replaced the second content with information resources.
But i could be opening a can of worms here. Consider a database query result that forms the content of a report. That’s a view of structured content, yes?
And structured content falls outside the purview of ECM? Does it? But it is an information resource…

Finally business beccomes organizational goals as per Daniels suggestion.

Still two sentences but so what?