Project CSP/Essential features of a CSP framework/Research review

CSP (Content Services Platform) or ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is a current topic of interest for many organisations in the public and private sectors as they try to grapple with enormous volumes of data and information scattered among a plethora of different information systems and repositories (physical and digital) that have little or no integration.

CSP and ECM are frequently used interchangeably, however CSP is the newer term. They are used to describe a collection of capabilities which enable organisation to create, manage, analyse and extract information across a variety of different repositories. Gartner distinguishes CSPs by reference to some of their core capabilities, e.g: "CSPs are best aligned with use cases that cover the more formal aspects of how content is used in an organization. This is in contrast to content collaboration tools (CCTs), which are often used in more informal, ad hoc collaboration. As such, CSPs typically provide advanced capabilities for content intelligence, records management, process automation and federation." Source: Critical Capabilities for Content Services Platforms, published 17 November 2020, by Lane Severson, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa

Below are three different descriptions of CSP/ECM derived from research carried out by Gartner, Forester and AIIM.

Gartner describes 9 core capabilities of CSPs
Source: Critical Capabilities for Content Services Platforms, published 17 November 2020, by Lane Severson, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa

Gartner also provides a functional definition for CSP in the same report although there is a slightly different categorisation to the capabilities.

Forrester identifies the following core capabilities that users require of ECM platforms:
Content migration Packaged applications  Integrations and interoperability  Repository scale  Metadata  Search  Intelligent content services  Lifecycle management </li> Knowledge/social graphs </li> Developer support </li> App design/development tools </li> Collaborative content services</li> Transactional content services</li> Source: The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q2 2021, The 14 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up by Cheryl McKinnon June 14, 2021

AIIM describes the capabilities of ECM as
Source: AIIM: What is ECM?