posted 7 Apr 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 9

Order from chaos

Organisations are drowning under a flood of information. Are content-management systems the answer? By Gary Eastwood

Faced with an avalanche of information, and the increasing burden of compliance with national, international and industry regulations and legislation, organisations are more confused than ever about what they should – and should not – be storing.

“We’ve gone from the sublime to the ridiculous,” says Liz Maloney, UK MD of document-management (DM) specialist Hummingbird. “From having no DM system at all, where information was stored on personal hard drives and in filing cabinets, organisations are now putting everything from e-mails to personal documents into their DM system.”

Few organisations today have a clear understanding of their obligations to keep electronic copies of information, such as e-mails, as well as hard copy, such as letters and faxes. In turn, this is leading to confusion not just about whether information should be kept, but also for how long and how it should be disposed of.

To make matters worse, it is estimated that 20 per cent of the knowledge capital of any organisation is still in a paper format. As a result, knowledge workers who do not have access to a document or records-management system spend up to 80 per cent of their time looking for information.

That is not to mention the mass of e-mails and instant messages that flows in and out of the enterprise on a daily basis – according to research house IDC, the annual number of business-related e-mails alone now exceeds 1 exabyte (or 1,000 petabytes).

As a result, organisations are quickly realising the importance of having unified access to the content that stems from all of their processes and transactions, and they are turning increasingly to content-management systems (CMS) to help them do that. The question is: Are the systems up to it?

After kick-starting the content management market in the 1980s, the concept of document management fell out of favour a decade later, to be replaced by online content management as a result of the hype over the internet. In turn, this evolved into enterprise-content management (ECM) and now into information-lifecycle management (ILM).

This confusion has been a hallmark of the market, with vendors such as EMC Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven, Boadvision, Hyperwave, FileNet and Vignette – the last bastion of web-based content management – attacking the problem from a dizzying number of angles, from online content management to digital-asset management to records management.

Fortunately, after a rash of consolidation, all that may be over, with most vendors in the space now, in general, offering the same broad functionality, regardless of the moniker under which they operate.

“The content-management industry is maturing nicely – like a piece of Brie,” says Dave Gingell, VP of marketing at EMC Software. “Now vendors and customers understand what DM is and how it fits into ECM and the overall goal of information management. Content management [in its broadest term] is starting to be seen as platform on which to build and implement content-centric applications. It’s starting to become part of the infrastructure,” he says.

“Organisations are looking holistically to manage documents and retain intellectual property. Rather than specifically saying they want DM, they are now saying we also want to know what to do with other content types and how that interfaces into records management, web-content management, collaboration services, and so on,” says Gingell

As a result, EMC launched what it claims to be the world’s first unified ECM platform, Documentum 5.3, at the end of March. “People now want a unified platform, so that content management is unified with records management, digital-asset management and so on with the same platform, same interface and same API set. People are now beginning to see the link between content management and the underlying infrastructure,” explains Gingell.

Toby Bell, research director at Gartner, agrees: “As ECM applications are becoming more strategic, buying requirements are shifting from point solution products to comprehensive platforms. A unified stack that can federate formerly isolated content repositories offers irresistible benefits to business buyers. New functionality supports content-enabled vertical applications development, lifecycle management, information access, collaborative processes and contextual presentation.”

According to Gingell, the overall goal is ILM, whereby organisations can attach a value to the information they hold. “Most innovation comes from the 80 per cent of data that is unstructured [not held in specific databases or repositories], so it’s about how you view and value the information held in the organisation,” says Gingell. “It’s a long way off, but we will soon get to the situation where organisations can assign a value to a group of information assets, for example customer contracts, and then assign a value and a service level to those assets. So one group could be assigned ‘platinum’ level, where infrastructure is highly available with lots of backup and disaster recovery, while another is assigned a ‘silver’ service level, where information is stored and managed on lower-cost storage media. CIOs and IT directors like this because it allows them to control and maintain costs and assign a value to different types of content.”

However, most vendors now offer a functionality that encompasses document management, records management, portals, collaboration and e-mail archiving, either as stand-alone or integrated packages. Even the traditional document-management vendors offer functionality far beyond that implied by the ‘DM’ tag.

“It’s all very well having a DM system, but now it’s about how you find that nugget of information buried in all that content,” explains Maloney. “Customers are now looking for that information in their key systems so that, for example, their financial system flags up three months beforehand that a contract is coming up for renewal.”

As a result, says Maloney, document management is only the basic requirement: “It’s no longer as simple as document management. Then you have to think about records management and documents that involve collaboration with third parties.”

The Hummingbird Enterprise suite comprises modules for document management, records management, knowledge management and collaboration, together with tools for data extraction and business intelligence, and presentation through a portal front end. According to Maloney, it also offers e-mail and IM management modules, as well as capability for all of the above on mobile devices.

Of course, as is the case so often in IT, the technology is not the answer, but provides organisations with a tool, and an opportunity, to assess not only their business processes, but also how they view their information.

“Companies are starting to think about their content as valuable information,” says Gingell. “That’s what ILM is about – it’s a strategy for ensuring that information costs are minimised and assets are cared for and exploited to their maximum. Content management and document management are a key part to delivering on ILM.”

At the same time, there is a growing appreciation that the reason for buying a CMS is not just about reducing the cost of managing information. “Document and content management have generally focused on cost reduction, but now there is a focus on the top line,” explains Gingell. “How can we make this information work for us? How can we optimise processes with partners, customers and suppliers?”

Hummingbird’s Maloney agrees: “Eighteen months ago people were just thinking about meeting compliance obligations, but now they also want to see productivity and efficiency gains. They want to achieve compliance in a provable way but also gain a business advantage with these systems.”

Another main focus for the vendors is the need to tailor their solutions to specific verticals, especially when it comes to industry-specific compliance obligations. “DM should not be stand alone,” says Clive Longbottom, services director at analyst house Quocirca. “Different verticals have different requirements.”While there is light at the tunnel for organisations grappling with content management, however, Longbottom remains unconvinced that their prayers can be completely answered by any form of CMS.“Content-management systems solve a multitude of ills, but they are very complex,” he says. “It’s still document chaos out there. Companies are putting large, expensive systems in place, and thinking that it will solve the problem. In reality, you probably only have 10 per cent of documents under full control. These systems only help you to manage the final formalised part of the process, but what about laboratory notes scribbled on a piece of paper? These could still form part of the audit trail in the pharmaceutical industry.”

Longbottom adds that, while DM and ECM systems are good for highly verticalised and formalised documents, such as legal or drug approval documents, they may result in organisations missing out on innovations that come from the flow of uncontrolled information.

“First, you have to identify the point at which you truly start to capture documents and intellectual property,” he says. “This has to be a fuzzy line, because it means assigning minimal value to anything considered to be a personal document. But that might mean missing out on the best thing since sliced bread.”