I find it hard to believe that there are still CMS vendors telling us that their software manages “enterprise web content”. Does “enterprise” mean just a more expensive way for large organisations to manage web content? Enterprise web content management is missing the point.
Firstly, if you think your organisation’s web presence is only the content generated in your organisation from your processes, you’ve completely misunderstood what the web is about. Your visitors aren’t just going to your site; they’re visiting sites all over the web. If you think they only want your “enterprise” content you’ve buried your head in the sand.
Secondly, if your website has a dedicated editorial team with a content strategy and proper style guides – and it should – they may well be resistant to the idea that anyone can be a web author as long as they use enterprise content management tools and processes.
The website is rarely just an end point or simple publishing channel for the documents your organisation creates. It’s market-driven. It’s meant to provide the information that your audience needs. Whether the website is designed to generate revenue (sell products) or to save money (stop people using more expensive channels like call centres), it needs to be managed so that your visitors can achieve their goals as simply as possible.
It’s because the creation of web content often sits outside enterprise processes that dedicated web content management software exists and stands alone from ECM. A good WCM will simply focus on making it as easy as possible to manage content created solely for publishing to the web, to be read on the web, by a specific audience.
There are of course many organisations who need to relate their website more closely to the rest of their activities. But what’s required isn’t just a piece of software that tacks “web” as a status on the end of a long workflow. You need a process that allows the website to request information from the rest of the organisation so you can deliver your web strategy.
If you view your website as a place where you can publish the “stuff” that your organisation produces, you’ll end up with enterprise web content management, and it will be bad for everyone involved. If you want a good website, make sure it’s a driver in your organisation and not a passenger.
Interesting post, but certainly your definition of “enterprise web content management” would certainly be very different to ours (and we use that term to describe our solution).
What we mean by inserting the word “enterprise” in front of WCM is to indicate the scale of the implementation rather than the type of content or the cost.
While there are many good WCM products out there, only a small number can manage some of the needs of very large organizations where “enterprise” architectures and scalability are very important (on top of standard WCM feature sets).
For example, proper enterprise grade support for “enterprise architectures” such as parallel environments and failover are not available with many systems.
Many large organisations publish and manage hundreds of websites. Our largest client has 300 websites with an overall 900,000 pages. Often at times they have up to 300 contributors editing content at any point in time. A WCM that is simply “good” will not make the grade there.
Those sort of issues cannot be addressed by smaller WCM solutions. Certainly when we use the expression we’re not trying to combine ECM and WCM, we’re just saying it’s WCM built for very large enterprises.
Just my two cents
Piero Tintori
TERMINALFOUR
Comment by Piero Tintori — 25 August 2009 @ 4:17 pm
I agree that the term is worthless. Enterprise-scale WCM for something like Oracle/EMC, but not EWCM.
You can take this too far though. While not all web content is “Enterprise” content, there can be an overlap, depending on the business that the company/organization conducts.
I think a major reason you see separate WCM systems is that many organizations are small and simple file shares or Google Docs works for them. However, when they need an effective web-presence, that requires something more.
Organizations of all-sizes need an effective web-presence, but not necessarily a system to manage non-web content. Thus you get specialization.
-Pie
Comment by Pie — 25 August 2009 @ 4:25 pm
I totally agree. Web content is not just an extension (or expression) of enterprise content. ECM’s claim over the web was a failure and showed their lack of understanding of the web. The web is not (as ECM vendors would have you think) simply another file format; it is a communication medium. I have seen the term “Enterprise Grade” as a classification of software that meet various scalability and security requirements demanded by large organizations. Kind of like “Industrial Grade” for kitchen appliances.
Comment by Seth Gottlieb — 25 August 2009 @ 4:29 pm
Great point. It’s not just that the “E” is confusing and carries its own stigma about technology-driven solutions, it’s the “W” as well. When looking at businesses where Digital is becoming the most important channel to build awareness, create engagement and drive revenue – Web is just one other touchpoint.
This is the reason for some vendors to change their message and redefine the “E” to mean Experience and not Enterprise. Or maybe the “C” means Conversation instead of Content. So we could have Web Experience Management or Enterprise Conversation Management.
Same product, different veneer? Maybe. Whether it is CM, WCM, ECM or EWCM, there is definitely an acknowledgment that the content is going beyond the browser. For the consumer, that’s a good thing
Tony Bailey
Twitter @tony_bailey
(Disclosure: I work for a consulting firm that implements this alphabet soup of software)
Comment by Tony Bailey — 25 August 2009 @ 4:57 pm
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Thanks for your comments. Two points that I should have put in the post:
1. This isn’t a criticism of any particular vendor (particularly those whose products I don’t know!). I don’t doubt the scalability or extensibility of “proper” WCM over blogging applications. But I think the nomenclature is confusing; why can’t it just be called big website management?
2. It is of course possible to manage websites using what I’d call ECM. You can assign content types that originate from the web team but that tie into your organisational processes. There’s still the issue of the web being seen as more than just another content channel, however. That’s not a technology issue.
Comment by Philippe Parker — 26 August 2009 @ 9:31 am