What happens when ECM is renamed to DMS?

When IT governance, steering committee, or strategy team renames a whole IT group from ECM to DMS (document management system) it is no small change. This change has many ramifications: changes to application software, data architecture, integrations, requirements, functionality, etc. A divide and conquer rationalization is presented. A “let’s look at all requirements from the stand point of: do we really need this?” Ok, but it’s not that easy.

What is lost?
Talent: it takes time to dismantle an ECM system into to smaller, more focused parts and personnel with attention deficit disorder will get antsy and want to jump ship.
Sense of cohesiveness in the lifecycle of content creation through disposition: application silos will start to appear.
Unlimited playground for the business to experiment in: the business will have more work to do to figure out what they really want to do and get measured by it.
Central administration of users and groups, access control, attributes, taxonomy, retention schedules, search, backup.
Source of record: How do you keep track of and archive content that need is mission critical and could be audited many years hence?

What is gained?
Broader understanding of the content lifecycle: because of more integration requirements, the business will have to know exactly where their content lives and is dispose of.
Divide and conquer mentality: separate groups tackling the tough business communication issues.
Better governance: now the strategy of cohesiveness of all the desperate applications will
Better data architecture
Better standards definitions and adherence: assuming there are strong governance and data architecture, standards should thrive and push integrations to new heights.
A distributed system which reduces the “too big to fail” issues of a centralized repository system.

Recycling the Same Issues
To what extent are we recycling the same content architecture, management, and publishing issues? Collaboration issues will be deferred to SharePoint, workflow will be spread among all of the applications, archiving will further muddled, group access control will be splintered further, regulation paper work will increase by the new amount of applications.

Content and Information Architecture Design
I have hope that this will be the golden age of the content architecture frameworks, that we will witness true policies which are governed by blueprints which can withstand the issues of silos of information, de-normalized data, historical metadata and the like. The framework would have to be malleable, yet strong. It would have to be clear and forward thinking to lay the ground work for all content and information evolution to come. Ok, I can dream can’t I?