February 15, 2005

CMS (content management system) and ECM (enterprise content management) are really misnomers for how content management were actually used by enterprises.

In reality, ECM was never made available to the majority of employees or used to manage content broadly, but was primarily used for small sub-sets of content created by specialized departments or workgroups.

As it turned out, ECM wasn't for the enterprise at all, but has existed for almost a decade as a specialized market with great promise, many vendors, and a bold vision that did not reflect actual enterprise usage. ECM was always for those heads-down content specialists, not the rest of us knowledge workers.

But, we're now seeing a major evolution of the content management market, which is driving true enterprise deployments to everyone -- and for all the content -- in an organization.

This evolution means that content management is not just about those 'content specialists' anymore, but about the rest of us who need some amount of content management functionality to complete parts of our everyday work -- from drafting a new business plan to sharing content with a virtual team - or getting a new business practice approved by multiple department heads.

The drivers of this change in the market are not new -- only more urgent.

At every level in an organization there is real pain related to the lack of management of electronic content. But the straw that is really breaking the camel's back is the concern about managing content for business risk, compliance, and legal discovery.

Executives are reminded daily (ten CEOs have now lost their jobs after investigations in New York state alone) about the risk posed by discoverable content like email, documents, or instant messages.

Meanwhile, employees are experiencing content overload and finding it harder and harder to locate and collaborate on content to get their work done. To make matters worse, IT is fighting a losing battle to manage the explosion of content cost-effectively and to surface content through portals and applications into emerging service-oriented architectures. So, it hurts at all levels in the enterprise -- and that means it is time for a change.

The requirements arising out of this mess are pretty consistent. First, the regulatory requirements for broad-based content retention and control highlighted by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, and industry specific regulations have led many organizations to conclude that all employees need access to simplified content management, so content can be controlled.

Second, the explosion in content has led many organizations to conclude that file servers and network attached storage devices are not the right place to manage content -- these servers are costly and are often used as content 'garbage dumps' by employees instead of useful collaborative tools.

Third, the need for broad-based deployments drive the need for scalability, low-cost administration, and low user software licensing, so costs don't scale linearly with each new user added. Finally, employees are requiring easy ways to share, search, and collaborate on content without changing the way they work, which drives the need for intuitive user interfaces surfaced in desktop, portal, and business applications.

Regulatory compliance, more than anything else, is the driver for broad-based deployments of content management. In one particularly painful case, a large automotive company found a 20-year old document that exposed a vehicle belt-flaw on a file server as part of a legal discovery effort.

This document ended up forcing the company to settle a lawsuit for more than $45 million. And every financial services company followed the epic $1billion settlement with ten investment banks driven by email discovery. Imagine the return on investment any of these companies could have experienced had they actually been able to control their content effectively.

The new executive focus on risk mitigation does not allow companies to manage just some of the content in their organization. As long as companies have uncontrolled file servers, email servers, and repositories with potentially risky content, there are unaddressed risks begging for controls. Remember, if you can't capture it, you can't control it.

First of all, it's really easy to use because everyone has to figure it out -- imagine something even your most technologically-challenged executive would be able to use.

The goal must be not to change they way users work, but instead blend the functionality into familiar environments, since any system that provides even a small barrier for users will likely fail to capture the content.

Second, it should be cheap to manage and run and be immensely scalable because you'll soon have terabytes of content once you start taking control of it. And it should be cheap to implement and have good co-existence capabilities since almost every company already has some specialized content management application in-house that completes a valuable business process.

Last, there's a growing consensus among industry analysts and enterprises that the battle-tested relational database (not file systems) now provides the right foundation for any true enterprise-scalable unstructured data management strategy -- just like the database has provided for structured content for decades.

So, one way to get started on rationalizing your content management strategy is to look at content management as you would view any other data management challenge.

Once you create an unstructured data management strategy for your organization that puts you on a path toward consolidation of repositories, systems, retention policies, and IT vendors, you'll have taken an important first step. Many organizations create cross-organizational working groups, which help create consensus across decentralized organizations and design the requirements for their own flavor of content management for everyone.

To realize the full potential of ECM, we need to redefine it as something that all of us can use. After all, that's the promise of ECM come true.

Source: Line 56