The Service Economy and the New Role of the Enterprise CMS

The enterprise content management system as we know it is about to undergo a transformation and take on a new purpose.

Content management vendors have been scrambling to throw as much social technology as they can into their systems by inserting a social engagement layer on top of the existing document repositories that have long been a fundamental necessity of the modern enterprise.

But the sea change of social applications for business use was underway long before these vendors added comments, “likes” and activity streams to the CMS. What’s more interesting is to ask why they are scrambling to add social and collaboration functionality. Why have they been trying to move even closer to the end-users?

Today’s workforce increasingly makes its own choices about which applications to use for productivity and social. Consumerization and BYOD have severely limited the opportunity for existing IT-centric content management vendors to move into the social and collaboration market in any meaningful way. It’s not about selling to the IT department anymore; it’s about appealing to an entirely new type of workforce that was bred during the rise of the service economy.

Employees are calling the shots these days. There’s no doubt about that. But how are they changing the role of content management? Here are the two big trends I’m seeing.

The Reign of End-Users and the Invisible CMS

Dropbox has over 50 million users that upload over a billion files every two days. Box has 11 million active users, penetration into 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and there’s an endless influx of new “Dropbox for the enterprise” players. Evernote has 20 million users and the list goes on.

Employees are choosing their own productivity applications and the adoption rates are putting even some of the most successful enterprise applications to shame.

The traditional enterprise content management market can do little to stop this. And few consumer-workers will choose a heavy IT-centric content management system over newer, cooler options that have consumer technology DNA at their core.

As employees use an ever-increasing array of apps to do their work, the enterprise content management players are going to have to find ways to get content to the end-points (read: apps) that employees rely upon the most. Box OneCloud is a great example of this strategy in action. It puts all of your content at the fingertips of employees who spend their days in a variety of unique, but integrated applications.

If you’re a sales executive working in Salesforce most of the time, you should be able to access much of the content you need without leaving that ecosystem. Why? Because jumping through hoops to access your content interrupts your workflow, and hinders productivity.

The same goes for the VP of Marketing, who wants to access content while working in Omniture, or the Director of Operations who wants to pull up the revenue projections while working in Freshbooks so that she can save back revised data and share it with the CEO.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com