As business applications try to go the Web 2.0 route, surely enterprise content management (ECM) vendors should be working to support customers via best practices and benchmarked processes. Yet a severe lack of consulting skills in the space, along with an endemic disregard for customers, leaves many ECM buyers with complex repository- and rules-management systems that they have no idea how to configure and use properly.
Business agility will drive the next wave of change, and ECM could become a key component in that mix, but only if our industry learns the lessons of history and works with customers to fully maximize their ECM investments -- supporting them long before and after the purchase order is cut.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe is a principal analyst at CMS Watch. Write him at [email protected]Large enterprises are now reembracing reengineering. It seems that there is only so much streamlining you can do until you reach a point where you need to completely rethink a situation. That point is being reached by more and more large organizations, and radical change is now on the agenda for banks, insurance companies and manufacturing firms globally.
