More than once I have blogged on the emergence of ECM as a specialized obscure practice within techno-geeks into the limelight of critical business applications. In my last blog post (“ECM It was the Best of Times, it Was the Worst of Times) I discussed how according to popular news sources, ECM was responsible for radically redefining entire industries such as newspaper publishing, leaving a wake of unemployed people and extinct businesses, but also at the same time promoting innovation and giving rise to new industries and burgeoning business models.

Today, in perusing The New York Times Business Section, I was again pleasantly impressed with the degree to which ECM makes business news. On page one (continued on pages 3 and 7) for example, the Times reports that Google is getting into the e-books business with a mission to take on Amazon and Kindle.

On page 4, The Times covers Google Wave, a “latest” Enterprise 2.0 application. (OK the Times may over state the value of Google Wave (see Dan’s commentary at IAM Alert: The Whimpering Google Wave), but ECM is nonetheless being covered in this reputable high profile business periodical. On the same page, Plastic Logic, a Kindle rival is also introduced, and e-heath records are positioned as a clear technology winner in the government’s economic stimulus package.

Page 5, covers the Hearst Magazine‘s strategy for successfully balancing paper-based and web-based magazine publishing.

Page 6 includes an article about an author who used Twitter to test works in progress. Based on collaborative feed back the very first sentence of a novel was changed – amongst other edits. The eventual publication, was then specifically formatted for publishing on Kindle.

WOW – that’s a lot of ink in one Business section devoted to ECM.  OK, maybe the articles do not directly draw the correlation to ECM, but the topics they discuss: e-publishing, dynamic content delivery, e-ink, digital paper, online collaboration – are topics ECM veterans such as myself are well familiar with, and have been heralding the power of for many years. With the broader business community now catching up, this should spell a bright future for ECM practitioners. Business executives hopefully will now better understand these concepts, and want to further explore the powers and capabilities of ECM technologies within their domain, to drive new business models, increase innovation, streamline costs and processes, increase effective communication…

As I said in the last blog post, “this glimpse into what ECM can/will be is nothing short of amazing. I dare anyone to view this and tell me that we are not experiencing “the best of times.” Indeed, to further quote Dickens, “we had
everything before us…”

But only those that “get it” will be able to leverage these capabilities before they morph from competitive advantage to simply a cost of doing business. Building such strategies is what we at Information Architected do with a passion – simply because it is so powerful and fun.