Content is king
- Posted:
- 00:00 25 Mar 2002
- Topics:
- Content Management | Enterprise Applications | Application Integration
One of the most challenging issues for organisations over the next few years will be implementing effective content management alongside enterprise integration.
Content management is increasingly becoming a part of the software infrastructure, being built on the foundations of an application server and integrating with other software such as enterprise portals, e-business platforms and business process management tools.
Users now want content to be application-oriented, instantly available, easily managed and dynamically delivered - which is a must for fuelling e-business. Thus, some form of content management system is essential.
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As the amount of digital content continues to proliferate, unstructured content, such as emails, images and documents, accounts for over 80% of data in a typical business. Within most companies the Internet, partners, suppliers, customers and internal documents generate masses of information, but this is stored in a variety of locations, including central servers, distributed servers, local PCs and mobile devices.
All of this information - including any that resides on middle-aged legacy departmental systems - needs to be integrated if the company is to take full advantage of it. Without the ability to organise this content, the information is lost and a valuable asset is wasted.
Global enterprises have three key requirements when it comes to content. They need a smooth internal and external communication medium for delivering content to different places; collaboration between the parties that hold a broad spectrum of cross-functional knowledge and content owners; and the intelligence to analyse this content and determine how it is used.
However, few companies achieve this Nirvana, as Jonathan Benbow, EMEA director of product marketing at content management specialist, Vignette, explains.
"Often the departmentalised working environment is at odds with the global market concept," says Benbow. "The same content gets re-created several hundred times in fragmented blocks and it must be updated and maintained separately. Enterprises haven't focused on developing a unified system where content is not duplicated and is available seamlessly across different portals."
Despite the fact that properly managed and integrated content can be a competitive weapon.
So what is best practice in content integration? Who are the major players and should users opt for bespoke or packaged content management solutions?
The worldwide market for content management systems will be worth $7.2bn by 2006, according to industry research firm, Butler Group. The company predicts that the market will eventually polarise into two sectors - providers of content management infrastructure, and providers of content management applications.
Content management systems today reflect the divergence between different vendors. The larger software vendors, such as IBM and Microsoft, have been manoeuvring to try to establish a position, both through acquisitions and strategic alliances, while the market is currently led by Broadvision, Divine, Documentum, FileNET, Interwoven, Stellent and Vignette.
The solutions that survive the vendor shakedown will comply with open standards, for example XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is because open standards are key to integrating content, business processes and transactions across both internal and external enterprise systems.
When it comes to choosing either a bespoke or packaged content management solution, bear in mind that a content management system can facilitate all aspects of content collaboration, management, delivery and syndication.
Accordingly, bespoke systems offer the greatest chance of limiting a company's data and system integration headache since the system can be tailored to the exact needs of the company.
Off-the-shelf packages might require additional, costly development to add functionality if it is to be of use to all areas of the business. Packaged systems also require additional servers, databases and extra administration, compared to a tailored system that requires minimum technical resource and system management.
David Gingell, EMEA marketing director for Documentum, says: "It is unwise to say that content management is easy to achieve. However, selecting the right content management product, which has a heritage of integration with other applications, will provide a high degree of investment protection and also reduce the reliance on bespoke development to tie systems together."
The main integration headaches users will face are:
- Legacy system architecture
- Point applications and management reporting
- Rights management for content distribution
- Content value and billing
- Customer relationship management to leverage existing branding, or re-brand
- Cultural and change management
- Personnel skills and training.
The key to a content integration strategy that delivers wide-ranging business benefits is to ensure that your company's business processes, strategy, application requirements and staff considerations come first, not the technology, according to Chris Kidd, senior manager of publishing for the Telecom Media Networks business practice at consultancy Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.
Another important consideration is not to view integration as a separate task but as part of the overall content management system implementation. Understand up-front what applications the content management system needs to interface with now and in the future.
Gingell advises: "Carefully evaluate your content management supplier to ensure the broadest range of integrations is available from them. Where they are not, then look at the vendor's application development environment. Is it fully featured? Is it easy to use? Does it support the leading standards? Will you be tied into Java or .Net or will you have flexibility in your development tools? How easy is it to manipulate content with the content management system and how easy is it to link content together from multiple sources?
"In other words, how flexible is the application programming interface of your chosen content management system? Ensure that the relationships that your vendor has with the vendors of the other enterprise applications are well-founded and that there will be mutual support for the level of integration proposed."
Clearly, on current estimates of the proliferation of digital content, it is unlikely that bricks and clicks companies will survive in the competitive fast-moving 21st century without dovetailing content management with enterprise integration with the help of software suppliers and systems integrators. The only questions left to answer are: when, and with whom?
