I wouldn't have thought this necessary a few weeks ago, but while I was interviewing a prospective candidate last week he stopped me and said, "You're looking for a Document Management specialist, not a content management guru, I'm more advanced."

"Oh," I said, and then bit my tongue. I know better than to argue with a guru, especially one who's self-proclaimed.

But when I put down the phone, I had to ask myself, am I sure I know how to talk about this technology? Having placed hundreds of people in the past twelve years, I like to think I go the extra mile to understand both what my customers do and what the professionals I interview have to offer. Heck, I even go to industry conferences and take notes at the lectures. I do all I can to insure that I understand at least the outer layer of the lingo. For example, I know the difference between a lifecycle and a workflow; I know that content can get chunked-up into bits of xml... but I don't know what a wireframe is, and that's what this guru kept talking about.

Now I'm probably making myself seem less resourceful than I actually am, (I put in a call to an Interwoven teamsite developer and got the skinny on wireframes) but I do think that the term Content Management means different things to different people (even to different developers and architects.) Is it that my "guru" saw content management through a web-only lens, while I saw it from a lower? Higher? Broader?, let's just call it a different lens?. Since most of my ECM searches have been in the Documentum world, is my view limited by Documentum's definitions?
Maybe.
Is this a problem for me?
As a Documentum recruiter probably not, or not yet, but still...

I'm going to supply definitions for the words Content and Management from the wikis then ask various vendors, technologists and consultants to frame the term Content Management in context of their offerings and/or experience. Maybe we can all learn something.

Wiktionary http://wiktionary.org says that Content is:
1. That which is contained.
2. Published information and experiences such as many novels, movies, music, game, webpages, presentations, organized data, etc.
3. (mathematics) The n-dimensional space contained by an n-dimensional polytope (called volume in the case of a polyhedron and area in the case of a polygon).

Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org says Content can refer to:
1. Information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in contexts that they value
2. Open content
3. Free content
4. Web content
5. Subject of the plot, in narrative works
6. Substance
7. Volume generalized to arbitrarily many dimensions in mathematics and physics

Management, according to Wiktionary is Administration.

So what is Content Management? The management of things contained, regardless of where they reside?

Is Content Management platform independent? Or is it called Content Management when it's about input and the web and does it become Enterprise Content Management everywhere in between?

Someone please explain.