Saved by Content Services?
The number of digital files (documents, email, databases, webpages, video, etc.) continues to grow at a blinding rate and managing this content properly is complex. Inadequate efforts are common and can become a source of embarrassment and even a serious risk to an organization. Worse, digital content management tends to be the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. Inaction is often the unofficial preferred course of action.
The Holy Grail?

Is content services the holy grail of digital information management? Gartner coined the term as a successor to enterprise content management (ECM) when they declared ECM to be dead. ECM was to be the single platform to manage all enterprise electronic content rather than use separate document management systems, web content management systems, and digital asset management systems as specialty products.
It turns out that different media work best with specialized user interfaces and filing systems optimized for that media and forcing an ECM structure on all media types did not add value.
The Opportunity
Management’s goal is digital transformation, to use technology to streamline work flow and to deliver dramatically improved value to customers. Streamlining workflow means to provide the right information to the right person (or persons) at the right time so that they can use the information in a work process that will meet a customer need.
The Problem
Information is squirrelled away everywhere. It can be in shared drives, personal drives, in Sharepoint, in dedicated databases associated with business, video monitoring and access control systems, on phones, in the cloud (in so many ways and locations).
Many of these data silos are managed by non-IT people so they may not even know how (or if) the data is being backed-up and protected. There may be 3 sources of the same information under different names and the sources might not match. There may be 50 copies of the same file name, sometimes identical, sometimes with minor variations. There may be no inventory of where all of the information exists and what it is. It’s likely that no one knows who ‘owns’ each piece of information. It also may be difficult or impossible to find available information due to poor tagging.
The CS Approach
No system is capable of finding all random information and all fixing business processes. This requires a strategic approach.
Gartner identifies that content services have less of a focus on content storage for the enterprise, and instead, focus on how the content is used by individuals and teams and how that information can be used to gain insight into business operations.
Content services may be an integrated product suite or an integration of separate applications that share common APIs and repositories. It is intended to compile content across multiple repositories.
This article was published in the
November 2019
edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:6 Issue:3
©2019 TMC Consulting