2006: Another Good Year for Content Management?
January 2, 2006
I don’t do or have much access to quantitative research, but many people (here, here, and here) pointed to 2005 as a growth year for content management. One of the drivers was the whole, dreary compliance thing, but I think there was more to it. The other contributing factors included:
- The increasingly inexpensive cost of digitizing legacy assets
- The increasingly inexpensive cost of adding significant structure to those assets while digitizing them
- The fact that we are several years into most (really, nearly all) content being born digital
- The fact that even unstructured content such as Microsoft Word and PDF files have some structure (read: XML) behind the scenes
- The growth in the use and usefulness of RSS
- The maturity of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), and thus the ability to bring more content-rich applications out to thin clients, Intranets and the Internet
- The growing number of programmers who can do SOAs, XML, content management, and content transformation well
- The growth in the use of transformation and rendering technologies such as XSLT and XSL-FO
- A growing recognition among line of business managers that these factors are all combining to make useful content management applications less expensive, easier, and more effective to deploy.
If I were to rank the relative importance of these factors, I would probably put the last one first. I had a number of conversations in 2005 where senior managers said to me, “Content management technology is more useful now.” When I first heard this, I didn’t really buy it. To me, the technology of content has been relatively stable for about 3 years anyway, maybe more. But the more I heard people say this, the more I had to reflect on it, and the more I realized they were right. If you look at my bulleted list (and you could think of more), a lot of good things have come together over the past several years. The result has been that content applications are easier and less expensive to deploy. And the rising skill sets have combined with a recognition from management to create more projects, more applications, and more growth for the overall industry.
2005 was indeed a good year for the content management industry, and I expect 2006 to be as well.
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 2, 2006 11:40 AM
