ENGLISH CONTENTS

Enterprise Content Management

A cura di Redazione DMO

Pubblicato il 26-03-2009 15:59

By Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology buyers are under pressure to cut costs and justify expenses at a time when small and mid-market vendors are now providing less expensive alternatives to larger ECM vendors. That was one of the key findings we uncovered during the research process for our latest version of The ECM Suites Report. Each year as we continue to analyze these technologies, we see some things remain static, and others change at a rapid pace - but one thing that remains in constant flux, is buyers basic understanding of what ECM actually is, and what it can do for their business. We see this manifesting itself in wacky shortlists and poorly constructed and articulated RFP’s - people think they need ECM, maybe even recognize the importance that managing documents/files and the related business processes within their organizations, but then fail to understand the fundamental differences and ‘fit’ between the ECM systems available in the market. Sadly, as a result we see a very high failure rate for ECM projects, most of which could have been easily avoided.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is broad enough to touch multiple areas within your enterprise. The most common reasons that managers use to justify applying ECM technologies are:
• To bring order to the ever increasing volume of electronic documents
• To meet new legal or compliancy requirements regarding the management of
information
• To reduce the amount of paper documentation within the organization
• To provide more standardized means of gathering and distributing data (e.g., via forms)
• To re-engineer business processes, and increase efficiencies
• To support business continuity requirements
• To obtain more value from costly investments in content
• To more consistently communicate to employees, partners, and customers

As times change, the marketplace finds new reasons for applying ECM technologies.
Compliance is a relatively new rationale, and now we are also seeing increased use of ECM platforms as a basis for application development of content-aware business applications.
Nevertheless, most of the time enterprises turn to ECM to reduce costs and bring information overload under control. Indeed, with digital information mushrooming faster than most enterprises can manage it, ECM projects have become a kind of cost of doing business:

Enterprises simply need to do something about information overload.

Technology solutions to business problems that are associated with the production, storage, and distribution of information have historically gelled around different types of management software:

• Imaging and Capture
• Collaboration
• RM: Records Management
• DAM: Digital Assets Management
• DM: Document Management
• Workflow/Business Process Management
• KM: Knowledge Management
• DRM: Digital Rights Management
• WCM: Web Content Management
• Portals

But today, the lines between these product segments have seemingly become quite blurry, and there is consequently broad confusion around what is increasingly being called “Enterprise Content Management” or ECM. When is a document a “digital asset?” Shouldn’t my Enterprise Portal also control versions of its associated code base? Don’t all digital files represent “content” of some kind?
Compounding this confusion has been the rapid expansion of feature sets among ECM
vendors to capture larger market-shares, or simply lay claim to an ECM mantle. While some companies have taken a partnership approach – particularly among the more niche-oriented vendors – the marketplace as a whole has seen substantial convergence, consolidation, and overlap. This, coupled with vague yet expansive marketing information, can make it difficult to discern the core capabilities of the solution a vendor may be offering. Moreover, a vendor may only provide a single function-point solution, such as Imaging or RM or WCM, but call themselves an “Enterprise” Content Management vendor because they are targeting enterprise-level customers, or simply because that term makes their software sound more sophisticated and valuable.
This report focuses on Enterprise Content Management (ECM), particularly vendors who purport to sell collections of products as part of a larger “suite.” ECM itself is a term still in search of a commonly-accepted definition. Let’s explore some of them.
“Enterprise-level” Function-Point Solutions This could be a very big DM, DAM, or WCM implementation that crosses departmental silos, and essentially promises a highly scalable approach to a common, practical need. This is a nice
strategy in theory, and some large, cohesive enterprises (especially in the tech sector) have executed successfully on it. However, we see some backlash against this approach today in some areas for financial reasons and because the implementation times across multiple silos can be highly impractical.

Ubiquitous Content
This school of thought says that ECM is not an application, but a framework for making
content as accessible as possible to the right people from wherever it lives, and that the prime function of disparate repositories is to feed the right information in the right format to key line- of-business applications that truly drive profitability. Many enterprises want to experiment incrementally here, even if the fundamental concept of “content anywhere, any time, any format” remains highly utopian. Nevertheless, we believe that understanding “ECM” as a framework for threading together content-rich applications across the enterprise is a useful way of trying to obtain more value from heretofore isolated function-point solutions.
The key takeaway from our research though is that selecting the right technology to meet your specific needs is no easy task. Reliance on Magic Quadrants or big brand names is not the way to go - the only way is to research deeply, both locally and internationally amongst the very wide range of system available. A good and fun place to start is with CMS Watch chart below - as part of The ECM Suites Report 2009, CMS Watch released the newly updated "ECM Suites Cross-Check(tm)" diagram - offering a buyer- oriented risk assessment of the ECM marketplace. The diagram specifically addresses vendors' evolution as it relates to product development, providing an overall marketplace assessment.

as you will see the market leaders continue to represent some of the highest risk to buyers in terms of product stability and corporate change (IBM, EMC, Microsoft), due to continued rapid development of new product features and the difficulty of digesting acquired assets

- Mid-market and small specialist vendors today typically represent a lower risk in terms of both product and corporate stability (e.g., Hyland, Saperion, EVER, Laserfiche, Xythos, ISIS, and KnowledgeTree, among others)




Beyond this though, you need to research carefully and deeply amongst the many options out there - and whether you use our services (and we hope you do!) or somebody else’s, or even decide to put a team together and finance the research yourself, be sure to do it and do it thoroughly. ECM is such a broad and sweeping area, that failure to select the right technology can result in equally broad and sweeping failure.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe E’ un Principal della CMS Watch, una società di analisti di tecnologia vendor-neutral che si occupa di ECM. Prima di entrare a far parte di CMS Watch ha gestito un team di consulenza su ECM alla Wipro, una delle più grandi società di servizi del mondo. E’ stato anche molti anni alla Ovum, la più importante azienda di analisti in Europa, come Vice Presidente e Direttore di Ricerca per il Nord America. Ha più di 18 anni di esperienza come consulente di IT e di Business. E’ una riconosciuta autorità su Document, Content e Information Management. E’ autore del report ECM Suites per CMS Watch (probabilmente il report più dettagliato e esteso su questa tematica) ed è citato regolarmente nelle riviste specializzate. Mr. Pelz-Sharpe è apparso in parecchie occasioni come esperto sulla BBC, BBC World, ABC e CNN International. Presenterà per Technology Transfer a Roma il seminario “ECM –Tecnologia, Architettura e SharePoint” il 25-26 Maggio 2009.

Commenti

Per poter commentare registrati o effettua il login

Non ci sono commenti per questo articolo.