Future of Enterprise Content Management

An Information System’s key purpose is to manage and serve information to it’s users. Thus information storage and retrieval is at the heart of any IT system. Most systems use Relational Databases (RDBMS) for this purpose.

As technology matures, software development tools progress towards working in the business domain. As an example, programming languages have come a long way from machine code to assembly language to procedural languages and now to object-oriented languages and 4GL. I don’t see why data storage, retrieval and management shouldn’t follow the same evolution cycle. In the past developers used punched cards, followed by flat files and moved to relational databases for data storage and have been stuck at relational databases for around 20 years now.

By leveraging the ECM system, application developers not only get the information they need, but also access the related business process logic (like work-flow, access control, audit logs, etc) associated with that information. Systems can thus have a true single point for defining business processes and associating them with the relevant data, be it documents, orders, email or anything else that is content. With all this hype about corporate governance going around, ECM vendors seem to be cashing in by providing features necessary for standards compliance. This becomes all the more reason to leverage the ECM and thus transparently inherit all those features in your new applications.

Thus by using the ECM system as a development platform, application developers progress to developing systems closer to the business domain. This allows application developers to be more of “domain experts” rather than “technology experts”. Gradually, development tools will become sophisticated enough to not require “techies” to handle them.

To truly move in this direction, ECM vendors will need to collaborate to standardise a WebService API for ECMs much like how ANSI-SQL attempted to standardise interactions with RDBMS. Up-until now, ECM technologies like Web CMS are looked at as technologies for end users to access and manage content. This will change as more and more projects integrate their ECM system with other enterprise applications like CRMs and ERPs. In the future, ECM will replace RDBMS for data management in enterprise applications. An RDBMS back-end may still be required by the ECM itself, but it will be as transparent as assembly language is in today’s software compilers.

The same ECM system will be used by end users (business users), other IT systems and application developers as a platform on which new applications can be built. The future seems to be very bright for ECM as it slowly creeps in to occupy the top-spot in the organisation’s data center.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

 Loading ...

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.