Another conversation today and another datapoint to contribute to my growing belief that large enterprises are now re-embracing re-engineering. It seems that there is only so much streamlining you can do until you reach a point where you need to completely rethink a situation. That point is being reached by more and more large organizations, and radical change is now appearing on the agenda, for banks, insurance companies, and manufacturing firms globally.

Last time around, re-engineering led to ERP and benchmarked best practices. This time around the dynamics are different. Business agility is the latest fashion. That requires technology to be infinitely reconfigurable, but also highly organized at the infrastructure level to have a chance of working. As business applications try go the Web 2.0 route, surely ECM vendors should be working to support customers via best practices and benchmarked processes. Yet a severe lack of consulting skills in the space, along with an endemic disregard for customers leaves many ECM buyers with complex repository and rules management systems that they have no idea how to configure and use properly. Business agility will drive the next wave of change, and ECM could become a key component in that mix, but only if our industry learns the lessons of history, and works with customers to fully maximize their ECM investments -- supporting them long before and after the Purchase Order is cut.