What's in a Name: The Enterprise Content Management vs. ChatGPT Trajectory
In early 1998, a few years into my tenure as AIIM presidential chair, rumblings had already started around the primary terms we used to define our industry. Terms like imaging and document management and workflow, which represented discrete industry segments, seemed insufficient to describe the broader set of integrated capabilities that we ultimately called “enterprise content management” or ECM.
That rebranding, triggered by AIIM, wouldn’t really begin until 2000 or so. And of course, at the beginning, most people hated the term. I can still remember all of the emails, “What was wrong with document management?” Eventually, as content management capabilities became more modular and delivered on-demand as services, folks grew tired of ECM. Gartner pronounced the death knell, and eventually I wrote a paper in 2017 that proposed “Intelligent Information Management” as a new umbrella term, which not incidentally also just happened to preserve the AIIM acronym.
All of which is to say that I have an inordinate preoccupation with industry terms, how they are used and how they spread. But as the above examples illustrate, usually the time frame for awareness of these terms is measured in decades.
Enter ChatGPT.
The ECM Tortoise and the ChatGPT Hare?
Here is a Google Trends chart on IIM (blue), ECM (red), content management (yellow), and information management (green) over the past 12 months. While I might hope that IIM would pop up a little higher, I can take some consolation that ECM has been around over 20 years longer than IIM.
I’ve written a fair amount about ChatGPT over the past two months on my personal blog, using the technology to write a good part of the posts. I would like to say that I discovered ChatGPT through some sort of proprietary technology that I use to monitor innovation, but the real reason is my son said, “Dad, you need to look at this.”
Off to the races I went. I asked ChatGPT to write stories for my grandkids, tell me the key elements of a Valentine’s Day hit song and even to create an information governance acrostic poem.
So, what in the world is going on? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything quite like the ChatGPT phenomenon. Here is an updated version of the previous chart, adding ChatGPT (in purple) to the mix.
Yikes.
Something is clearly going on here, and it’s not the cleverness of the name. The OpenAI folks may be many things, but I doubt they spent gazillions of dollars on one of those fancy naming consultants to come up with a “can’t miss” name.
Related Article: Knowledge Management vs. Organizational Intelligence: What's in a Name?
Learning Opportunities
What Comes Next?
ChatGPT is just one of many ventures pushing the boundaries of large language models and AI. The technology is fascinating, but ChatGPT isn’t the only example out there. And clearly the sexiness of the name isn’t what propelled ChatGPT into popular consciousness.
Writing 70 years ago, Arthur C. Clarke provides a clue to explain the ChatGPT phenomenon: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
ChatGPT is not the first large language conversational tool. And it is not the only one. But it is the one that burst forth into the magical realm and made AI magic real, tangible and available to anyone with a browser. Prior AI innovations laid the foundation that allowed the magic of ChatGPT to break into popular consciousness.
So, what comes next? The implications now that the magic has been released into the world are myriad. My friend Mike Salvarezza from MER recently shared some of his questions in just one arena, information governance:
- What are the limits of this technology? As social media, and media in general, swirl with reports of the capabilities, what is true and what is hyperbole?
- What is the future of this technology? (e.g., are all forms of writing and authorship going to become obsolete in the face of this?)
- How do we distinguish what is human generated vs. AI generated? Does it matter?
- Can it be hacked and spoofed and used to create “bad” content? (Bad defined very broadly.)
- What does this mean for records and information management? For information governance? Can it help solve our information management problems? Will it create others?
- What are the legal ramifications of documents not written by people? What will the future look like on the legal front?
I would add to this list:
- What are the ethical implications of all this? Who will lead in addressing them? As we demonstrated with social media, leaving these questions to profit-maximizing technologists does not always create optimal outcomes.
- Thinking back to the embarrassing congressional hearings on Facebook, how will policymakers even begin to understand what is going on here?
- Can dialogue-based language models be pointed at the morass of information accumulating in our organizations and finally make knowledge management possible?
- How will this disruption play out in the vendor space as the AI land grab explodes?
Magical rides, by definition, are not always predictable.
Things are about to get interesting.
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About the Author
John Mancini is the President of Content Results, LLC and the Past President of AIIM. He is a well-known author, speaker, and advisor on information management, digital transformation and intelligent automation.
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