It’s about solving business problems.

Came across a really nice quote today on the MS SharePoint blog site.

“Customers come first. There is a lot of exciting technology in SharePoint but the objective is not a building a computer science project. What matters is solving business problems.”

Right on Jeff, (go here for the full story). It is all about solving the business problems. After all business (in the context of ECM) is all about people working with content in concert with  business processes, as those people try to do their job and be successful.

ECM should be about helping people to be successful by providing them a set of seamless services that enable them to deal with content and the associated business processes in an effective and efficient way.

Given today’s landscape of business problems there is NOT and I repeat NOT one technology to rule them all.

We have a need, more than ever, to find a way to easily combine and in most cases reuse, adapt, federate, combine the technology sets that have been deployed in business to solve the business problem, not just deploy the technology.

Too often ECM is pitched as a single technology suite to solve all problems, this is not the case. Technology is the last piece of the puzzle. In a blog site that I use for just capturing my thoughts about ECM I explain the linkage of people, process and technology this in a model.

But coming back to the title of this blog. ECM is all about solving business problems, I think that we should not lose sight of that and we should strive to get connected to the people and these problems first, after all as Jeff says in his blog we are not building a computer science project!