Recently, it brought Gartner released its new Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, completing the market transition Gartner announced with a blog post 10 months ago: "ECM is dead (broken, finite, an ex-market name), at least in the way Gartner defines the market". With the publication of the Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Gartner now completes its definition of the market transition. What can we learn from this market change around information management?

To bring clarity in terms of technologies, processes and strategies that organisations use to manage content, Gartner has changed its Enterprise Content Management definition from:

"The term enterprise content management (ECM) describes both a strategic framework and a technical architecture that supports all types of content (and format) throughout the content life cycle. As a strategic framework, ECM can help enterprises take control of their content. It can contribute to initiatives around transactional processes, compliance and records management as well as sharing and collaborating around content and documents. As a technical architecture, ECM can be delivered either as a suite of products integrated at the content or interface level or as a number of separate products that share a common architecture."

...to a new 'Content Services Platform' definition:

"A content services platform is a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organisation."

In July 2023, Gartner published a more modern definition of what we should expect from a Content Services Platform today:

So what can we now conclude after this change?

1. The information management market is a growing market anyway. Regardless of the definition, "content management" is a significant market - according to Gartner's estimate it caps $6.1 billion and is growing at 8% per year. A development worth noting.

2. This is a market in the midst of transition. This is a striking market in which there is a high degree of concentration: the three largest providers represent 43% of the market, suggesting that there is a battle at the top, aimed at stealing and exchanging market share. And that there is decentralisation where there are many alternatives, different flavours and new players. A group of "others", consisting of more than 1,000 providers worldwide, owns the No.1 market share slot with 29% of the segment. I think this split is largely a result of the way the market has evolved. Primarily due to the approach of large companies. Large process challenges owned by specialists and later by evolving to a process focused on knowledge workers.

3. The battle for the top positions by the traditional players in the market has only just begun. One of Gartner's strategic assumptions for the CSP market reads, "By 2020, 15% of enterprises will have dropped their traditional ECM provider in favour of a provider offering consumer-like content services".Add to this the second prediction, "By 2020, 20% of the major EFSS and ECM providers will convert their existing offerings into content service platforms" and there is a playing field with more players who will enter the fray. Not everyone will succeed in this new power play of content services. The spearhead will be the integration of the platform, content and interfaces to commonly used systems (ERP, CRM, productivity applications, etc.). This through publicly available APIs for application integration, multi-repository support, data integration extensions and out-of-the-box connectors.

4. Technologies are not strategies. AIIM always thought of ECM more as a strategy rather than a technology. AIIM's definition reads, "ECM is neither a single technology, methodology or process. Rather, ECM is a dynamic combination of strategies, methods and tools used to collect, manage, store, preserve and deliver information that supports key organisational processes throughout the content lifecycle." ECM or CSP are usually equated with technologies, not strategies. It is important to constantly remind ourselves that they are not the same thing.

5. Strategy is leading, technology supporting. Ultimately, the real focus should be on what you do with content (strategies) rather than the constant search for the means by which you do it (technologies). One of the reasons why AIIM started moving away from the ECM definition three years ago was their concern that it did not adequately cover the load. ECM does not sufficiently describe all the 'content-y' things people actually do on a daily basis. How they approach content and all the different flavours of content solutions out there to solve very different problems. What organisations do with content has moved beyond traditional definitions. We need a new "technology roadmap" for the information management capabilities essential for digital transformation and to meet the challenge of radically redefining customer, employee and partner experiences.

Earlier, I wrote about the shift from Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to Intelligent Information Management (IM). To cope with the shaken market, the focus should be on the following four core components:

1. Modernising the information structure.
2. Digitising core infrastructure.
3. Automation of compliance and governance.
4. Comprehensive analytics and machine learning.

The most modular, user-friendly and consumer-like content services will have the greatest chance of success in achieving these four digitisation strategies.

Developed on exactly these four building blocks, M-Files helps organisations achieve those goals. You can M-Files free download and try it out for yourself. Moreover, our Dutch experts are on hand for a personal online interview.