By Susan E. AldrichSr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group
You'd expect anything with "enterprise" in its name to be pretty big. IBM's Enterprise Content Management platform is breath-taking for its breadth. First of all, it redefines the meaning of "content." IBM expands the definition of content to include all types of records and archives (paper!), tweets, audio, and video. IBM's platform also provides a broad set of services covering all the ways organizations interact with unstructured information. IBM's ECM platform embraces services to store, analyze and annotate content so that some structure (metadata) can be imposed on it and value extracted from it, mine it to extract insights and correlation, classify it, report on the sentiments expressed therein, search it, organize it for discovery and compliance, provide business process management services, manage digital assets, and deliver information to portals and other agile interfaces.
IBM's picture of its ECM Platform is so broad and deep it calls to mind SAP's enterprise resource planning. If you're still thinking of content management as a few tools to help you with revising and publishing articles or Web pages, you are so last century.
As you'd expect from an IBM vision, ECM is a layered architecture. The ECM Platform is comprised of multiple repository technologies, the ECM framework, and user interfaces.
