Enterprise content management (ECM) solutions will be defined by new best-practice guidelines to be issued by BSI British Standards within the next nine months.

The UK standards body has teamed up with ECM solutions provider The Content Group in an attempt to help businesses understand ECM and its benefits.

Ben Richmond, founder and chairman of The Content Group, believes it is vital that the rapidly expanding ECM market settles on a technology and product-agnostic standard that will provide an industry-wide code of practice against which customers can compare different solutions.

“Individual corporates and providers have their own ECM standards but there is no single, publicly available, universally recognised standard to enable firms to meet compliance challenges, compete on a global basis and share information effectively,” Richmond said.

Although the standardisation process, set to be complete by mid-2008, will be led by The Content Group, ECM vendors, technology partners and trade associations will all have a chance to provide their input, Richmond added.

“We should end up with something that everybody is happy with. If we do not get a standard in place, everybody will have their own idea of what ECM is and what a successful ECM strategy might be,” Richmond said.

Some watchers said an attempt to standardise approaches to ECM is overdue given the technology’s position at the heart of corporate governance compliance measures.

“Any level of standardisation is a good thing in such a disparate industry,” said Ovum’s Mike Davis. “It should make deployment more rapid and provide much more chance of meeting project objectives, but I’m sitting on the fence as to whether the BSI can pull this off.”