Is Best Practice the Whole Question?

At the end of my last posting, I asked a question about what constituted a new best practice for the implementation of ECM.  There is a question that must be answered with regard to how we implement ECM today but there is also another, broader, question about the very need for method within the context of ECM application implementation.

ECM implementation methods are needed because of the nature of the user experience and the implementation requirements of these applications.  Changing the deployment approach paradigm requires that we begin to think differently about the nature of ECM use and find a better way to interoperate with these applications.

The way in which we share and exchange information must become less focused on the content and more focused on the person.  It is the experience, role, and knowledge of the person who produces the content that we are seeking that gives it a meaningful context. The manner within which ECM systems are deployed today tends to ignore the content creator as a retrieval or discovery element and focuses more on content description based on highly symbolic keyword taxonomies.  But, these metadata systems lose relevance over time and are less meaningful to groups who are more distant, geographically, culturally, or organizationally, from the taxonomy creator.

On the other hand, linking content to a knowledge expert and creating relational links between experts and content provides a context that can cross these boundaries and be meaningful to people overtime.  But, since ECM systems are not designed in a way that optimally supports creating a context for information like this creating these relationships is challenging.

Before we can look at an alternative approach to ECM introduction, we must find a better way to think about the ECM experience.  People think about people when they think about knowledge.  Let's link people to information and use this as the basic premise for user experience.  Let's think less about systemic structures for organization and retrieval and more about relational structures for how we access and use information.