Mens Et Opera - Reloaded

The question of whether PIM is an “MDM use case” or an “ECM use case” (ECM stands for Enterprise Content management), or a combination of both (as usual) has become the topic du jour in certain parts of the blogosphere. I am glad that I’ve contributed to raise awareness around this topic with my series of posts ( here , here , here , here for an introduction). Let me try to visualise these two worlds. Let’s start with MDM. The much respected Henrik Liliendahl has a nice diagram to exemplify the MDM world. Quick digression: As you probably know, Gartner is now revisiting their MDM quadrants to be more use case driven…yes, in 2016. Better late than ever ;-) This is how the MDM world works: you have multiple domains e.g. Customer, Products, which have different processes attached to their lifecycle. For example, products go through a “making” and “selling” process while customers “making process” is a completely different beast and the entire lifespan of a customer follows separ

This is the third instalment of the series about the present and future of PIM. Readers are invited to take a look at the previous posts ( here , here ) and the interlude about the interplay of content and data . PIM as a content and publishing platform Longtime readers will be familiar with my approach to PIM. In short, PIM is a discipline, or at least the fundamental tenets of PIM are dictated by how businesses operate to bring products they sell to life, and not by technology vendors (that’s why it is a discipline). As such, it is a discipline that ties in a number of processes such as product introduction, product lifecycle management, supplier collaboration, customer conversion, etc. (being a discipline is a beautiful thing because it springboards innovation (but this is a different story…). Now, and this is the crux of the matter, to mature a product into a state where it can be sold across multiple customer touch points requires a systematic approach to developing and c

In my last post I proposed to see PIM from at least two distinct standpoints. The first is the traditional view of PIM as part of the broader MDM family. The second, I argue, is an emerging trend that see PIM as an element of a broader marketing platform.  This will be part of a forthcoming white paper I am working on for HubDesigns .  For the time being, I thought it would make sense to spell out a few things about data and content to help understand the point I made in the previous post. This is an interlude between the previous posts on this topic and the next one that will conclude the series.  Remember, PIM as "an MDM use case", to cite Andrew White,  tends to be engineered around data optimization, while PIM as a "Content Management use case", tends to satisfy the appetite of marketers (details are here and here ). Data and Content Data is the mechanism to 'register' what happens in the world. This can take various forms. For insta

In the previous post , I offered a view to look at the PIM marketplace. From retailers and manufactories perspective, PIM has become a necessity to meet fast paced customer demands. The vendor marketplace, on the other hand, is getting crowded to meet the increasing demand. In that post, I also provided a few criteria to make sense of different vendor offers. In this installment and the next, I intend to articulate a further criterion, or a standpoint to look at the PIM market. Let me first summarize what we have so far: Some PIM vendors are traditional, some emerging, some disruptive (less than a handful) Vendors tend to primarily focus on one target company size, i.e. enterprise, medium, and small companies Finally, a practical way to group vendors is by the kind of use cases they are primarily designed for, e.g. emphasis on buying or selling side processes, marketing content, merchandising support, channels, etc. From (1) one deduces that the market has been increasingly