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...