Sean R. Nicholson

Last week was a great week for online discussions relating to Intranets. On Monday, Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs posted an article to his blog asking whether the term Intranet is dead. His thoughts were sparked by a recent presentation by Jane McConnell of NetJMC and the conversation that ensued was a healthy dialog on the future of Intranets, their relevance in a world of social media, and whether the term “intranet” was really the best way to describe an interactive workplace. The conversation continued throughout the week and I’d encourage anyone who works with Intranets to check out the threaded discussion and add their $.02.

Tuesday continued the interesting online conversations as Jarrod Gingras and Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch made his predictions for technology in 2010. One of particular interest to me was his prediction #1 that :

1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways
ECM as a marketing and technical concept has great validity. But the idea of having a single overarching platform to manage all sources of content management only works well in those enterprises that follow a unified and services-oriented architectural approach to IT.

I agree with Jarrod and my interpretation of this prediction is that organizations that aren’t able to settle on a single vendor for all of their information systems or aren’t able to invest in a comprehensive services-oriented architecture just won’t be concerned with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) because they won’t be able to address every departmental business process problems with a single ECM tool.

To expand on Jarrod’s prediction, I’m thinking that as more and more vendors build document management functionality into their applications, organizations will be less concerned with where it is stored, as long as it is stored properly, is accessible to the end-users that need it, and can be discovered and produced in time of legal necessity. Instead of costly redevelopment of business processes to restructure where content is stored, organizations will invest in search technology that allows content to be stored in native applications and use search tools like Microsoft Enterprise Search, Autonomy, and Google appliances to ferret out information.

In other words, federated search will become crucial to organizations that choose not to implement a structured ECM architecture.

The results of this kind of shift are as follows:

1. Content and documents  will reside in their native application, allowing the information to have more context than if it were stored in a centralized ECM system.
2. Those ECM vendors who wish to provide value to the enterprise must figure out how to store the content centrally, yet serve it back to end users in a context that is meaningful to their end users.
3. ECM vendors who provide true, enterprise-scale software MUST offer a full services-oriented architecture that will allow business applications to easily access the content and surface documents in the context of the business application.

S0…this brings me to my question of the week. Is Enterprise Content Management going the way of the Intranet and becoming an outdated notion? Will better federated search technologies negate the need for a central repository? Are organizations better off investing in the functional elements of ECM like document management, records management, and business process management instead of buying the whole enchilada?

I’m curious to see what others think…looking forward to thoughts/comments.

Sean R. Nicholson

In the second article in this series, we’ll focus on understanding Content Management and how it differs from Document Management and Knowledge Management. If you recall from the first article in the series, Document Management is all about how we create, manage, route, retain, and destroy the container that we refer to as a document. Content Management, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the information stored inside that container and how you can effectively add/edit/delete the information in the document.

Keep in mind that while some folks use the term “document” generically to refer to Microsoft Word documents (primarily because they use the .doc extension), a document can also be an PDF file, an HTML file, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet…really any kind of container that holds content.

Distinguishing Between Pure Content Management And Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Note: Before we dig into the details of Content Management, we need to establish that the focus of this article is to define and discuss pure Content Management separately from Enterprise Content Management. ECM blurs the lines between Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management which, when brought into the conversation,  makes it difficult to discuss each of the separate components on their own merits. So, for the duration of this article, take a step back and let’s just focus on the Content Management component, apart from ECM. In the final article in the series, I’ll bring it all back together to discuss ECM.

So What Is Content Management?

In it’s simplest term, content management is simply editing a document to add, replace, remove, or modify the content. When you open a new Microsoft Word document on your desktop and type a few lines of text, you are engaging in content management using MS Word as the content management tool. You then save the document and store it on your computer, network location, or document management system. Through this process, you have engaged in both document management (the creation and saving of the document) and content management (the adding of information inside the container). Simple, right?

Content Management becomes much more challenging for organizations when you ask many people to collaborate at the same time on the same document. Issues arise such as the following:

• How do you keep one person from overwriting the content that another has added?
• How do you keep people from corrupting documents by editing them at the same time?
• How can you control the quality of the content to ensure proper spelling and grammar?
• How do you audit when someone last edited the content?

The existence of these, and many other issues has driven the creation of tools that allow organizations to collaborate around content, aka Content Management Systems. By introducing functionality such as user accounts, authentication, check in/check out, change tracking, and rich text editors (aka “WYSIWYG”), Content Management systems have addressed many of the concerns created by mass collaboration by limiting what individual contributors are allowed to do with the content and tracking when content is being edited. By leveraging this added functionality, organizations can minimize some of the risks of mass-collaboration and can maximize of the benefits that content management tools offer.

Different Kinds Of Content Require Different Editing Tools

In their early days of distributed content management, CMS tools focused primarily on editing Web pages. These Web Content Management systems allowed non-technical users to create, edit, and publish content to corporate Web sites and Intranet portals without having to know HTML, JavaScript or any other coding languages. As a result, organizations were able to empower their business users to take ownership of the content in their Web site and Intranet portals without having to engage IT for each and every change. In addition, the use of user accounts allowed organizations to control which roles were allowed to create content, edit it, and approve for publication.

Because of the proliferation of these tools and the rapid organizational adoption of them, the term Content Management System became synonymous with Web Content Management System. But as organizations saw the value of these systems and a variety of different types of content were introduced into the enterprise, new content management tools were needed.

For instance, digital assets such as images, videos, Flash movies, and audio files presented new challenges. To maintain the quality and appropriate use of these corporate assets, Digital Asset Management Systems were created to all organizations to manage the assets in a similar fashion to managing documents, while allowing some content management functionality through plugins with popular editing software like PhotoShop and Flash.

Document Management and Content Management Come Together Through Business Process Management

As the ability to edit different types of content has grown, organizations have recognized that the content management and document management can be intertwined to improve on business processes. Business Process Management tools provide organizations with graphical workflow solutions that allow for the creation and routing of documents from one user to another. upon arrival in their workflow queue, users can edit or review the content using a content management tool and then finalize the document or route the document to another user or queue for further processing.

Business units like Accounts Payable, Human Resources, Contract Management, and Decision Support have optimized document and content management by applying automated business rules that allow the document to be management in a specific manner based on the content.For instance, in situations where an invoice has a low total amount (say under $500), an organization can auto-approve the payment of the invoice without a high level of risk. In situations where total invoice amount exceeds a threshold, the workflow can route the document appropriately for a content review to ensure proper auditing.

Bringing Content And Documents To The Users Through Knowledge Management

The process of creating documents and managing their content continues to become more difficult as the volume of information in the organization grows. Effective organizational content and document management strategies are going to have to find ways to get the right information to the right user. To do this, business process tools and content management systems are going to need to leverage knowledge management principles to evaluate content and route content appropriately.

In the next article in the series, we’ll take a look at how Knowledge Management principles can be used to ensure that content is being effectively reviewed and used in the organization.

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the last few years, the term “Enterprise Content Management” (ECM) has become a term familiar to those working in the Intranet, Web, or Knowledge/Information Management sectors. The difficulty lies in the fact that, while the term is easy to toss around, the actual definition of what is expected to be encompassed by ECM continues to evolve. As a result, ECM to a Records Manager often means something very different than what ECM means to a Web Developer. In an attempt to more accurately define ECM, this article deconstructs the term into a variety of subcomponents that are commonly included in discussions about ECM.

Core Functionality for ECM

Recently, when conducting a search for an ECM solution for a Fortune 500 organization, the following core requirements were set forth as required elements to participate in the selection process. These core components provided a basis for what was expected to be included in an ECM offering:

• Document Management (DM) – Centralization of millions of documents was core to the functionality of this particular business and document management is probably the most consistent component in the definition of ECM. In this case, the DM system was required to have a browser-based folder view of the repository as well as check-in/check-out document collaboration, robust full-text searching, and the ability to secure documents at the organizational, folder, and document level. In addition, the solution required full auditing capabilities of each user and object within the repository. Finally, integration with the enterprise email system, while not required, was favorable.
• Web Content Management (WCM) – Although the goal of this particular RFP was to select a content management system (CMS) for an Intranet portal, the principles were the same as the selection of a Web Content Management System.  The solution had to include a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) rich text editor that allowed content creators and managers to easily edit and permission content. In addition, the solution had to offer the ability to schedule content for future publication.
• Records Management (RM) – To comply with the corporate retention schedules, the RFP required that the selected solution provide Records Management functionality that included the ability to schedule the review and destruction of items marked as corporate records. The ideal solution would allow for the creation of a variety of retention categories that allow for the movement of corporate records from real-time storage, to secondary, and eventually tertiary storage as the lifecycle of the record progressed.
• E-Discovery Tools – With E-Discovery weighing heavily on the minds of corporate attorneys everywhere, it was required that the selected solution provide the ability to locate content based on keyword searches or metadata and place those documents or records on legal hold for review. These documents, while in hold status, would be exempt from the records retention/destruction policies. In this case, the E-Discovery tools were only required to access content and not data. The distinction is that the ECM tools were focused on content stored in document and portal/Web content repositories and not in application databases such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions or billing systems.
• Enteprise Search Integration – To provide a single search interface to users, the solution was required to provide search integration through an Application Programming Interface (API) using the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) or other suitable messaging platform. The implication was that users should be able to search many sources of content using a search interface integrated into the corporate portal.

Just to participate in the selection process, each vendor was required to demonstrate that they offered the above functionality. That doesn’t mean, however, that these five elements completely defined ECM for that organization. Even after the solution was selected and implemented, the definition of ECM continued to evolve as users identified new content types and needs. Discussions of blogs, Wikis, and digital assets identified new potential content and required the reshaping of how content would be captured, stored, and governed. As this evolution progressed, several additional components were added to the organizational definition of ECM.

Secondary Functionality For ECM

• Transactional Content Management – Activities such as claims scanning and processing, invoice processing, and human resources employee packet processing all require that data be captured via scanning or electronic methods, and processed through a workflow until completed.
• Business Process Management - Activities that require documents or content to be passed through a workflow needed to be automated using a business process management tool. These tools allow the Business Process Owner to lay out the business process in a graphical manner and then create worflow rules that govern the routing of the document or content to various roles in the organization. The classic example is that of the content creator/editor/approver. The content creator creates the content and then routes the content item to the editor queue for editing and review. Once the content is edited, the editor forwards the content item to the approver for final review and publication.
• Digital Asset Management – In this age of digital media, the protection of electronic assets such as coporate logos, images, videos, and audio files is becoming of increasing concern to organizations. Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems focus on securing and protecting those assessts, restricting whether they can be used, duplicated, or altered by users and tracking when those activities occur.
• Knowledge Management – Knowledgebases, Wikis, blogs, microblogs, forums, and mashups are surfacing more frequently in the enterprise and the content created by their authors is key to capturing information once trapped inside each employees head. Using these tools, content authors can share their experiences and understanding of the organization. Each comes with its own challenge, however, as the content is often controlled by the creator and often has not review process.

Clearly, to this organization the definition of Enterprise Content Management went far beyond the ability to simply store a document in a centralized location and locate it when necessary. Just as in this example, organizations are continually being challenged to define what should be included in their Enterprise Content Management solution. As new types of content are identified, the need to store, secure, and locate them becomes more and more crucial to business operations. As a result, the definition of ECM will continue to evolve and the solutions offered to manage these content types will be required to either specialize in specific aspects of the content or grow to become all-incluse of the various content types.