Beyond “Availability”
Content Productivity Still a Key Challenge

The goal of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions is to enable organizations to improve the management of the estimated 80% of corporate information that is unstructured content. ECM solutions have been available for several years, begging the question: “What problems remain to be solved by them in 2004 and beyond?”

Phase One

Moving Content from Multiple Places to One Place. For most organizations, content resides in multiple places: end-user desktops, departmental applications and enterprise applications. As a result, finding and delivering the right content to multiple audiences is a complex challenge. The first generation of ECM solutions solved this “content availability” problem by getting all the content into a single system.

However, by centralizing the content, only one part of the problem was solved: finding it. It did nothing to solve the problem of creating and managing audience-specific content. Content availability-centric solutions required creating multiple copies of the content for each audience—which, in turn, created a content maintenance nightmare. Organizations facing this content chaos must wrestle with the needless proliferation of multiple, inconsistent copies of content, which causes these further problems:

• Additional copies of the same content needlessly increases the volume of information (which is already growing exponentially);

• Significant amount of time is wasted with repetitive approval cycles;

• Content that is created as a derivative of the original content is difficult to find and update;

• Content errors and inconsistencies are proliferated, making it hard to ensure accuracy;

• Linking related content together and managing the lifecycle implications, especially if one part changes, is impossible, which further prevents achieving accuracy and timeliness goals; and

• Increased instances of broken links on Web sites.

One approach to solving this problem has been to focus on multiple channels as different output types. But multiple file formats are not the same as multi-channel delivery of content to multiple audiences. Content itself must be modified for different audiences, not just its format and/or file type. For example, an HR department’s employee benefits information is provided in detail on the internal intranet, but is summarized on the public Web site for prospective job applicants.

Phase Two

Solving Content Productivity. Beyond content availability, content productivity allows organizations to reuse their content in the most efficient manner. Industry analysts estimate that duplication of effort and failure to reuse content adds approximately 65% to the content overhead in most organizations. Solving the content reuse challenge with content productivity capabilities provides the missing link for ECM users.

In order to improve content productivity, ECM vendors must focus on how to make content reuse easier and more efficient. By providing capabilities that solve content productivity challenges, organizations will be able to significantly reduce content chaos and achieve substantial benefits:

• Increased revenue through improved customer, partner and employee relationships. This results from the delivery of consistent, accurate content to both existing and new audiences;

• Improved employee productivity, because content owners are empowered to easily create and manage audience-specific content;

• Reduced costs, since finding, updating and maintaining content (both the original and all related derivations) are now possible;

• Increased customer satisfaction, because information is both timely and accurate; and

• Improved regulatory and legal compliance, because content is both accurate and consistent.

Content Productivity: A Driver for 2004

As 2004 unfolds, more and more enterprises will shift from content availability systems provided by document management-centric solutions to reuse-centric ECM solutions, as their need to support multiple content channels drives their requirements for high-reuse content. The ECM solutions that have focused on content reuse are typically Web-centric solutions, such as Percussion Rhythmyx, since organizations need this to support their multiple Web-based initiatives (e.g., Internet sites, corporate and departmental intranets and customer and partner extranets). Organizations using ECM solutions that deliver high content productivity with easy, efficient content reuse will shorten their time-to-value and thereby gain the full benefits of optimized ECM.

Yesterday’s ECM challenge was content availability. Tomorrow’s challenge is solving content productivity by providing efficient content reuse.

Rhythmyx ECM

Industry-First Capabilities For Achieving Content Productivity

• De-Coupled Delivery for cost-effective delivery to multiple audiences and channels

• Impact Analysis to assess the effect of content changes before making them

• Intelligent Relationships for proactively managing content dependencies and connections; and

• Active Assembly, a unique graphical user interface for enabling business users to easily reuse and re-purpose content.

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Percussion Software’s practical software solutions maximize the value and quality of enterprise content for over 2,500 customers worldwide. With the industry’s only De-Coupled Delivery architecture, Percussion’s Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management product provides cost-effective, multi-channel delivery of easily reusable content. The company’s Rhythmyx Express Portal enables workgroups to attain immediate portal productivity at a significant cost savings