Nautis Project

My interest in ECM (enterprise content management) is purely based on the value it can deliver to the business. I think much progress has been made, but the focus is still very much on technology. I would start with your users and ask them what would make their lives easier - that would be my feature set. Some of the things business users often ask for seems impossible, but the basic theme I usually get is this: they want the system to handle the difficult, time consuming stuff and shift the complexity away from the human and put it onto the machine. To most users, this was the point of buying the system in the first place.

Here are some suggestions:

1. A good ECM should ask the user what to do, rather than the user telling it what to do. For example, multiple choice questions rather than user input fields all over the screen (also called wizard or expert system).
2. A good ECM should learn over time and predict answers. ECMs are currently pretty dumb and do not provide value above and beyond what is put into it. A good ECM would create more value in its output than was necessary to input.
3. A good ECM should be knowledgeable and able to answer to intelligent queries (way smarter than askjeeves). Interacting with the system should be at least as simple as interacting with a person on the phone.
4. In a good ECM, the interfaces that business users interact with should be as clean and simple as the interface to an iPod or Google. The usability bar has been raised.
5. Content/Document tagging should be done on the fly by the ECM, not by the user. Business users cannot be in the job of data entry. A good ECM will be smart enough to appropriately tag all content with minimal human intervention.
6. The user interface should not have to be upgraded twice a year or even once a year. A good ECM will learn and grow with the business. To business users, a good ECM will feel like we all feel about Google: it’s a part of my day and it’s not something I dread doing - because it does what I want it to do and it’s simple.

I know these are ambitious and it may take some time to get there, but these should be the goals of any future ECM strategy.

(I actually wrote this on 16 Jul 2005 but it definitely still applies today.)