The names may change, but in many ways the story is the same. Over the past several years, we have seen a quick and accelerating shift from one term to another that attempts to name the technology responsible for creating, updating, managing,and distributing material in many forms. "Document management" seems so 20th century now. At one point, though, "documents" were all the rage, and "document management" was the technology that was going to solve all your problems--get your intellectual assets under control, help workers be more productive, and give your organization the competitive edge it needed. "Knowledge management" was a short-lived and unhelpful coinage, and had most of its impact on poor, unwitting, marketing executives at document management technology companies, who struggled mightily with the question of whether to call themselves "knowledge management" vendors or not. With apologies to Shakespeare, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Call it a "document," "knowledge," or "content," the problem set that was identified years ago is, at its core, the same. There is simply more of everything--more core material, more forms of it, and more ways to distribute it. But "content management" as a term seems indeed to have legs. All the analyst houses, from Gartner to Forrester, use it, as do many leading magazines and newsletters, and many, many vendors. More significantly, the term is maturing beyond being a catchall, and people are beginning to understand that "content management" is a broad, far-reaching, and complex field. As leading analyst Frank Gilbane recently pointed out in his Gilbane Report, "Everyone needs to manage content, but the similarity ends there." THE LAY OF THE LAND Whatever content management is, though, it is already a big business. One analyst group, Ovum, had 1999 sales for content management tools at
展开▼
