Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg has put together a nice piece on his CEO blog about the differences between their content serving technology and content management systems (CMS). In a nutshell CMS technology is used by enterprises to develop content for publication and to store it in a central database: CMS emphasizes workflow controls, publishing controls, auditing, rollbacks, and so on. On the other hand, XML-based content servers take content from all sorts of repositories, including CMS platorms, and packages it in the best way possible for a variety of audiences whose needs may have very little to do with how a CMS manages content. A CMS is a great way to keep your finger on content creators and to keep them productive: content servers keep their audiences productive by serving up content in far more useful forms. Content servers are being used quite a bit these days for publishers looking for quick solutions for "chunking" content from document repositories that can't be reconfigured easily every time someone comes up with a new idea for a content product.

The separation of content creation technologies from audience-driven content publishing technologies is responsible for many of the key advances being seen in publishing as of late. What format and selections of content does a user need? It can vary greatly from audience to audience, making it very impractical to approach existing content creators and their support staffs to adapt to those audience requirements on a fairly arbitrary basis (from their perspective) or to try to repurpose legacy content. This same concept lies at the heart of the success of search engines: search query results are in essence custom publications that normalize content from a multiplicity of formats and sources to suit an audience's need for prioritized organization. We may encounter these sources in their native form if we click on a link from their listing in search results, but in most instances that document was never developed with presentation within search results in mind: the search engine technology took what it needed to make it relevant to the audience.

Mark Logic is but one example of technologies making these kinds of transformations possible, but one that clarifies the differences between process-oriented content management and audience-oriented content servers and services. As publishing becomes less tied down to specific output formats and more driven by audiences that demand content in packaging that's highly attuned to their immediate needs the very nature and value of "works of authorship" is being changed. Copyright is becoming a less important commercial concept than context rights in large part because of highly responsive content technologies, making the creation of valuable and highly tunable context for an audience an original work in and of itself. Maybe it's time for us to ditch talk of "I.T." in the publishing industry and start focusing on the value-producing capabilities of "C.T."