How can retailers manage data flow across multiple channels which
embraces not just product and price details but also images, video
and voice?
Ask Forrester, Jupiter, Giga and most of the management
consultants - the latter no doubt sensing long projects and big
fees - about content management, and they will tell you it's big
and it's important.
It's about how companies trading across physical and electronic
channels, fixed and mobile, manage and distribute content. In the
case of retailers, it's about how they can bring together price,
product size, colour and style, images, video and voice in order to
create the master catalogue.
They can then construct the ideal interface to customers through
the store, mail-order catalogue, the Internet and Wap phones,
ensuring consistency, speed of delivery and accuracy of data
delivered.
Data sources need to be integrated and centralised. Systems
managers have no problems seeing why data should be centralised for
structuring and distribution through any channel, but what are the
real business benefits? Kieran Kilmartin, Mediasurface product
marketing manager, says bluntly, "Customers interact with content.
If you can't manage content efficiently, you won't be able to
maintain customer relationships."
Steve McClure, a research vice-president at IDC, says,
"Companies must understand that content management, irrespective of
language, location or digital channel, is an essential requirement
for e-business success. The development and delivery of content,
within and outside of firewalls, requires solutions that implement
quickly and allow users to immediatelymanagelarge amounts of
content and changes."
Web content management has become firmly established as the key
to e-business success. In this year alone, respondents in a recent
Forrester survey plan to spend anaverageof$40mon e-commerce
applications, 72% above last year's amount of $24m. And industry
analysts agree that content management is the cornerstone of
robust, high-end e-commerce applications.
Despite being mercifully free of hype for a new IT buzz phrase,
content management is often misunderstood. Many will say that it is
about how your Web site looks. That is reasonable, given that most
of the handful of suppliers in this market are only concerned about
the Web, such as Broadvision, Vignette, Interwoven and Media
Surface. However, even they recognise that the Internet has far
from killed off traditional direct channels such as the humble
mail-order catalogue, which is in fact thriving.
What departments require is a structuring tool that will create
a media-neutral platform which stores the product and service
information astext, images, audio or video, independent of media or
format. This then allows information to be published in any format
(Internet, catalogues, CDs, stores, call centres and now, Wap and
interactive TV) from the same central database, ensuring
synchronised pricing and product details across all channels.
Such a tool will enable retailers to extract data from existing
systems and place them in a central hub for easy publishing and
distribution. The traditional database companies such as Oracle are
getting into the content management business, and Oracle has added
Oracle Portal and Oracle Internet file system - which sit on the
main database - as ways to pre-order data for new channels,
accessible by ordinary users.
Inevitably the main problem in managing content is scalability.
CarolynPatterson, Oracle's Internet platform marketing manager,
says, "Plenty of companies start small and then can't scale or
don't realise quite how much data the Internet will generate."
Retailers, however, tend to be some way from embracing this
vision. Almost all of them manage according to the needs of each
channel rather than having an overall strategy. Bricks-and-mortar
retailers tend to start from a position of having stores and then
wanting to move into other channels.
What most have done is to start from scratch, discovering that
the information they need to create catalogues or Web sites resides
in many different places, is often not translatable into new media,
and is costly to both extract and publish.
Andrew Pearson, regional manager for Vignette, adds, "Many
retailers have outsourced their Web sites so they have no control
over content. It's a messy situation and many firms are simply not
taking the problem seriously."
Pearson's comments are borne out by the fact that the main
content management providers have hardly any retailers,
bricks-and-mortar or dotcom, on their books. Pearson says this is
due partly to the complexity of managing content for retailers.
"There are plenty of publishers who have taken this route, but they
are going to have to think aboutre-engineeringfor retailers."
Given the scepticism that many retailers have about non-store
channels, this is unlikely to happen tomorrow. Paul Ellis, business
development manager at content management solutions provider,
Zygon, admits it is a problem. "We are talking about million-dollar
sales here and a need for bigger servers and masses more storage,
even before the issue of consolidating data has been
addressed."
A number of companies provide a different solution for each
requirement, denying retailers the flexibility they need to take
advantage of new opportunities as they arise. They will also be
prevented from applying a consistent strategy across all their
channels to market.
Ellis says, "Retailers should look to see where their
information sources are, then where their customers are, and build
a path between them." Partial solutions abound and yet it is also
becoming clear that no single company can do everything.
Ellis' advice to retailers is to choose suppliers who are
prepared to partner. "Integration is needed between many of the
players in this space. SAP and IBM emphasise integration but do not
provide best-of-breed solutions."
What he does not say, as analysts who prefer to remain nameless
assert, is that the ERP providers are now starting to talk about
content management but have no solutions.
Zygon likes to team up with companies already established in
core retail systems and has partnered with retail software company
NSB, which provides merchandising, warehouse and EPOS systems.
"Dataflows between those core retailer systems are essential to
make transactions and fulfilment through any channel work," says
Ellis.
Vignette, which is one of the biggest players, puts its growth
down topartnerships withAndersen Consulting, PWC and CSC as well as
IT suppliers IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun.
This is all fine in theory, but IT managers looking for evidence
that this works are waiting for projects to be rolled out. Unable
yet to discuss work for customers, content management companies
look to the future. Zygon, whichis waitingfor storecatalogue
retailer Argos to go public with its solution, PPM, says that
interoperability in the supply chain, with third parties, is the
next step.
"This has not been addressed yet but when it comes to supply
chains, data will have to flow outside companies and there will be
issues of systems compatibility, standards, process protocols and
so on," explains Ellis.
Did he say standards? Inevitably in the standards world there
are already two approaches battling for domination - Rosettanet and
Microsoft's Biztalk. Zygon is firmly behind Rosettanet as is HP,
Intel and Oracle. Ellis says, "Biztalk is about technical standards
for e-business while Rosettanet specifies actual business
processes. The technical side is taken care of by specifications
using XML, leaving retailers to worry about processes."
Ultimately, content management is only the start. As Pearson
says, "Retailers will say that the goal is customer service and
retention and yet few are using content to personalise Web
sites."
This is the next big challenge. How to reconcile content about
products and services with data about customers to create the "my
Web sites" so many retailers talk about. For retailers with lots of
transaction data piling up in data warehouses but little actual
knowledge of their customers, this could be a challenge they are
not yet ready to meet.
Research company Giga hints at the technical goals. "Clients
should now be linking existing content management applications with
personalisation/analysis engines, and integrating both with their
e-commerce platforms."
This process has only just begun and there are many barriers in
the way. One is the power struggle for access to and control of the
customer. The mobile telephone companies currently will not tell
retailers who is on the line, so if a customer hits a Web site
through a Wap phone the retailer cannot tell who it is, making it
impossible to personalise the interface and do marketing.
And the biggest issue of all is re-engineering. The content
management companies will admit that once an organisation is
constructed around content rather than its traditional interfaces
with the customer, the highly departmental structure of retailing
falls apart.
More people will be needed at the centre just worrying about
content and how to make it available to customers.
The retailers that understand this are the dotcoms that have no
existing infrastructure to maintain, and yet it is the
bricks-and-mortar retailers with transaction, merchandising,
fulfilment and logistics experience that may be better placed to
fulfil demand once push turns to pull.
Get the facts
One place to go to learn about content management, apart from
the various briefings offered by vendors, is GearUp 2000 in San
Francisco on 2-3 October at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA.
For more information, contact Teja Patel on 001 408 530 5809.
Wap phones turn push into pull
The content management companies have all recently added Wap
capability to their products. This seems to be more than just
following a trend. Once customers can pull data from lots of
different companies, they can compare prices. If the salesman says
they are offering the best deal or choice on fridges, the customer
can check without leaving the store. He can even check another
supplier's stock, order and pay online. Retailers that are not
prepared to give customers this level of visibility into their
organisation will lose the sale.