By David Roe – Enterprise content management (ECM) has moved on from the big proprietary systems of the early 2000s to the agile, flexible, cloud based content management systems (CMS) of today. Enterprises looking to invest in content services need to consider the key characteristics that separate one system from another — interoperability, reliability and accountability.

Content Services in Enterprises

As Stéphane Donzé, CEO of AODocs noted, these traditional systems are inherently monolithic and proprietary with high implementation costs and contractual lock-in. Content services platforms (CSPs), on the other hand, provide the modularity, agility and scale that digital workplaces demand. So what is the difference? The approach to CSPs is, as he said, “becoming more and more Lego-like, allowing organizations to easily integrate with other systems and the growing number of ready-to-use modules available on the market, particularly those that are AI-focused …. Being locked into an ECM prevents companies from evolving with technology and leveraging these new components that allow for more efficient workflow and scalability.” 

The key differences according to Gartner, is that they represent two distinct ideas, which are outlined in its Reinventing ECM research, the paper that first postulated the end of ECM. The report reads: “Content services are a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.” Read more: