What is Content Management?

CMS Watch > Blog: What is Content Management?.

There’s a question that keeps popping up around our industry: “What is Enterprise Content Management?”

You’ll find no lack of answers. My colleague Alanargues persuasively that ECM is most useful as a term to describe the biggest platform vendor offerings. Industry associationAIIM defines ECM as “…strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents…” AIIM also helda clever contest to define ECM, where the winning submission suggested it was about laundering and generally taking care of your documents as if they were your clothes. The discussion continues, andthere are no lack of definitions.

I suspect the emphasis on ECM definitions stems from a disconnect. We have this all-encompassing term — Enterprise Content Management — that doesn’t reflect how marketplaces and real-life projects actually break out into very specific categories and disciplines, like Document Management, Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Information Architecture, E-discovery, Process Improvement, and so on.

I think there’s actually a deeper question that’s looking for an answer here. Let’s strip out “enterprise” and simply ask:What is Content Management?

My definition is…

Content Management is themanagement of content.

Now, at this point you might be feeling ripped off, because of course that definition is a tautology. But please bear with me

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