ECM is dead! Rightfully so?

The Smoker and the Quitter

"ECM is Dead!": I put that on a slide for a team presentation we had at my favourite pub back in the fall of 2011. In all honesty, a bit too early to make such a old statement, but, at the time, I genuinely thought Enterprise Content Management had it coming.

After my presentation, when I was smoking a cigarette in the freezing cold outside (yes, I still smoked back then, but smoking indoors had been banned earlier that year) one of our team, came to me and said: "So, that means that I'm going to be out of a job". My reply was: "Not immediately, but your job is going to have to change." (Shortly after that, he quit the company.)

The ELC in London

Fast forward to December 1st, 2016. I was invited to the Executive Leadership Committee of AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management), a bit of a who-knows-who of the ECM world, with representatives from EMC, Gartner, OpenText, Kofax, IBM, etc. I felt flattered.

You have to know that 2016 was the year of GDPR and of the Digital Act in Belgium. Left and right all types of new compliance rules and regulations were spawning: MiFID, AML, GMP, etc. etc.. Myself, I saw a bright future for ECM, mainly for compliance purposes.

But, at the ELC in London, a bald (or at least a very short-haired), bespectacled German, that I had never laid eyes on before, stepped onto the stage. He introduced himself as the main man for all things ECM at Gartner and his following lines were: "Compliance doesn't sell anymore. ECM is dead! We from Gartner are going to declare that ECM is dead, and that from now on it's going to be Content Services and Content Applications".

I was flabbergasted. But, it happened as such, and a month later Gartner published a blog post and started pushing that message. ECM had died. If you're a Documentum, FileNet or OpenText consultant and this is the first time you're reading this: My Condolences.

We're they right?

Those who know me well, will also know that I'm not the biggest Gartner fanboy, but I have to admit that they were right.

ECM tried to be everything to everyone, all at once, but failed horribly: Document Collaboration, Web Content Management, Records Management, Document Management, etc.

Let's have a closer look at how ECM failed in several of these domains:

1. Document Management: Only 5% of documents stored in a DMS, are really controlled documents that have a review cycle, need metadata and proper version management (think Quality documents, SOPs, etc.). Users were flooded with functionalities and metadata they didn't need.
2. Collaboration: Document collaboration has moved to the cloud and evolved in solutions like Google Drive or Sharepoint.
3. Knowledge Management: ECM failed horribly here, thinking that a search engine and metadata would do the trick. It's like answering "Google Search" when AI is the question.
4. Archiving: Records Management was the ECM solution for Compliance with regard to proper Preservation and Archiving of Records.

At the time, I thought that last category would be the place where ECM would prevail and all the new regulations would help to show how wrong Gartner was; How wrong was I, and I should have known, because we had already started building the replacement for that ourselves, and it is not a software, but a Service, a Software-as-a-Service. Compliance has become a service.

Gartner was completely right. The ECM market had died, and was going to be replaced by Cloud Services, but I was still in denial.