YAWN.YAWN, is that what you're thinking? It's what I thought when the CIO of one of my biggest clients asked me to conduct several searches for people who were familiar with this new, emerging technology. This was back in the early 1990's; for context, the boys at Sun were busy repurposing Java for the World Wide Web, and I was interested in meeting people who were going to build on-ramps to the Information Super Highway that, then Senator, Al Gore was talking about. Compared to that, pushing and pulling information out of Electronic Filing cabinets for the purposes of archival and retrieval seemed a little boring.

But my clients knew me well. "Don't you remember the Tylenol scare?" they asked. They explained that EDMS could be used to track the exact time and place the tainted pills were made AND they'd help pharmaceutical companies get new drugs to market quicker. "The paperwork on a new drug takes seven years to complete manually," they explained.

Whatever, I thought (though "whatever" wasn't used then the way it's used today.) I took on the search(es) because I knew my customers were smarter than me, that they took on projects that were good for both their personal and their companies' futures, and because this EDMS-stuff would talk to the World-Wide-Web. So I did the searches, accessed the Usenet at a college library and the seemingly more limited World Wide Web via Prodigy.

But enough about my early Internet-fascination, to learn more about Document Management I joined AIIM and went to their seminars. Topics like character recognition and document types were all the rage and .I learned A LOT about them because they had quizzes at the end if you got right answers, you got prizes (and I LOVE to win prizes.)

The fundamentals were pretty simple - scan documents into a system in a way that they become electronically stored, tagged according to their attributes, searched and circulated to authorized parties. Easy, especially if you didn't have to worry about implementation.

Little was said back then about delivering data into business applications and databases. Documentum was just emerging as a technology. Xerox was a big player in the Document Management Life Sciences space. It was what the earliest adapters used to speed drug submissions to market. Smart folks who were familiar with digital publishing (hence the Xerox connection) were tagging content with SGML. Document Management began to become about sharing content in and then being able to use it and share it in a protected format.

Now most of us know what's happened since then. The Internet became as accessible as the road outside your house; XML was introduced; companies like Documentum, FileNet, OpenText and the like have become mainstream.

But despite all this progress, thanks to SOX, Records Management is in vogue again, and ECM technologies are again being used not to create or add value but for Compliance (a.k.a. Keeping the law off your back.)

This may not be all bad news for leading-edge ECM engineers. Though the business problem is simple, the rule-making and associated implications are both serious and costly, especially on an enterprise level. . And the technologies available to facilitate compliance? There's a new one and market entry doesn't seem to be an issue.