Contention Number One

We've all heard that 80% of an organization's information is unstructured "content" as opposed to the 20% that is structured "data," right?  It's so frequently cited you can't find the original source for it any more.  Unfortunately, that stat appears to be the only thing people continue to agree on when it comes to "content."  In just the last few years, Content Management alone has been positioned as Web Content Management (WCM) including "just one part of an e-commerce suite," or "source control for web sites," or "an underpinning for portals," to just a part of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) which was "a universal repository for all enterprise content," or "a set of pillars" including WCM, DM, DAM, RM/compliance, Forms, Imaging, and more.  Today, the Web and thus WCM is resurgent, but different than the WCM that came before. And if you think that's bad, look at related software for things like collaboration, portal, authoring, knowledge worker infrastructure, and the picture gets even muddier.  All of which leads to…

Contention number one: content is, well, contentious. (Groan if you must, I'm going with it.)

The fact is, for the last twenty years or more, IT has been utterly focused on the 20%.  For most data centric applications, we now have years of experience, design patterns, and a pretty decent view of the proverbial "software stack" required.  But when it comes to content, and so-called "content centric applications," even critical issues are not well understood.  This isn't your typical vendor positioning battle for a new market either.  Businesses, organizations, vendors, analysts, gurus – we're all working out now just how this should be done.  If it took 20 years to really sort through the easier "data" part, then it's going to take a while longer to get this content thing figured out.

Enter the power of blogs.  For all their hype and shortcomings, blogs do one thing very well – they provide a vehicle for a running account of developing stories and ideas as they emerge, particularly when something needs a good fleshing out.  They link to key events, stories, concepts and other bloggers so that readers can make up (and change) their own minds directly.

contentions is about this still new and rapidly evolving corporate focus on content; the applications, collaboration, systems, and often intense business changes that happen because of it.  If you're responsible for making these things work in your organization, check by from time to time to see what others like you have run into, and what the experts seem to be saying now.  Like any good blog, we'll wade right into the fray as it happens, and get your feedback as we go.  Send comments to contentions@percussion.com, and I'll post some of them in future updates (be sure to indicate whether you want to remain anonymous or not.)

Now some homework for our first readers: can anyone find the ORIGINAL research study that led to the 80% citation above?  Send me a link and I'll post it.  After a few days searching, I've only found everyone citing everyone else's use of it or the classic "recent research estimates have said…".  Hmmm, any chance all this content stuff was "group think" all along?  Can we all go back to "data" now?