The news that the BSI is to pursue standardisation in enterprise content management (ECM) brings to mind the old joke that standards are such a good idea, and that´s why there are so many of them for the same thing.

OK, so it´s not the greatest joke in the world but it underlines the ancient problem that conflicting standards, and poorly adopted standards, can create as many problems as they seek to solve. There are already solid standards for document management in particular, and for some poor souls whose job it is to ride the waves of compliance rules and regulations, it can very often seem that there are far too many.

On the other hand, ECM vendors have often been guilty of lock-in tactics either through complexities of licensing, the imposed difficulties of learning and unlearning some programs, or through an unwillingness to abide by the basic underpinnings provided by markup languages and other core systems.

Anything that makes it easier to swap between ECMs is surely a victory for the purchaser. However, it requires aleap of faith to imagine that vendors with plenty to lose will suddenly adhere to a flat-earth principle that lets all rivals be created equal. What may happen is that smaller vendors, including open-source ones, adopt standards in the hope of unseating veteran incumbents. That, it can generally be agreed, is A Good Thing but experience tells me not to imagine many buyers wanting to spend too much time tracking the minutiae of which vendors are operating on a level playing field and whuch are playing fast and loose.