Beyond Hammers and Nails

An old saying goes, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Of course, there's a big difference between hammers and enterprise software—but in reality, any tool can inspire similarly flawed thinking. The essence of the problem is simple: focusing so much on the tool that you lose sight of what actually needs to be built, and the best way to build it.

Consider an IT group with a new, top-of-the-line ECM platform. The natural inclination is to go from department to department and ask how they'd like their content to be managed—in effect, to ask where the nails are. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; most companies can find ample opportunities for efficiency and cost savings through better organization of content. But hammering nails is only the beginning.

Rather than simply managing and organizing content, companies today are laser-focused on putting it to work to drive business growth, and making the effective deployment of persuasive, external-facing content a top corporate priority. Instead of waiting for IT to ask how they'd like to use the new ECM platform, business professionals are taking the initiative and spelling out their own growth-oriented solution requirements:

• We need to be able to publish our marketing collateral with more accuracy, frequency, flexibility and responsiveness to daily needs;
• We need to be able to publish customized product catalogs on demand to meet the requirements of specific sales calls; and
• We need business professionals to be able to easily and efficiently publish a consistent, relevant marketing message across multiple channels, without having to bring in IT.

The response of IT has to be equally focused—and willing to think beyond the traditional boundaries of ECM to bring customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), product information management (PIM), enterprise marketing management (EMM) and other systems and technologies into the picture as well. Start by parsing out the exact capabilities needed to solve the problem; define the ideal solution first—then, and only then, decide how to assemble it from elements within the traditional "ECM" stack and elsewhere.

ECM: A Toolbox, Not a Tool

ECM as a category is built on idealistic promises: a unified repository for managing all types of enterprise content, comprehensive functionality for content-related processes, tight integration among applications and workflows and so forth. There's nothing wrong with any of these things per se, but we shouldn't become so concerned with architectural elegance and abstract IT ideals that we lose sight of the real value of ECM: helping companies tackle the complexity of content in a dynamic business environment and derive value where customer interactions and content intersect. At the end of the day, it's all about putting content to work to support growth.

Don't think of ECM as a single tool to wield bluntly against every content-related need that arises. Instead, think of it as a set of capabilities that can be combined in infinite ways, and integrated with supporting technologies, to solve specific problems. These capabilities might include:

• Web content management (WCM);
• Digital asset management (DAM);
• Content intelligence (CI);
• Composite application provisioning (CAP);
• Records management (RM);
• Imaging; and
• Workflow.

For those still thinking within the traditional ECM box, the list ends here—but a more solutions-focused perspective transcends arbitrary marketing categories to bring additional capabilities into the toolbox. Beyond traditional ECM, content solutions can also draw on a host of supporting technologies through flexible, modular integration in the context of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), including:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) to interact with real-time information on inventory levels, supply chain data, financials, etc.;
• Product information management (PIM) to interact with detailed product descriptions and specifications, pricing information, etc.;
• Customer relationship management (CRM) to interact with rich information on a customer's purchase history, contact preferences, etc.;
• Translation technologies to enable global campaigns and content to be rolled out in the appropriate language in support of local initiatives;
• Web analytics to translate real-time customer behavior into actionable business analysis; and
• Campaign management to manage and deliver coordinated, cross channel marketing campaigns.

Contrary to the notion of ECM as a single, monolithic entity, the real power of an ECM-centric solution comes from the ability to flexibly combine the technologies listed above, each with its own role to play, in many different combinations and permutations to build highly relevant, focused business solutions. While tight integration, a single repository and a consistent user interface can be important in some cases, in many others an effective business solution can involve multiple separate systems and repositories. The unifying theme for each solution is content and how its value can best be leveraged in a given context, rather than rigid architectural principles.

By taking this approach, IT can deliver solutions with the relevance and responsiveness needed to solve specific business problems and maximize business growth, as described below.

Business Solution: Timely Marketing Collateral

Challenge A large commercial property development and management company needs to be able to publish marketing collateral with more accuracy, frequency, flexibility and responsiveness to daily needs to better support property agents and new development initiatives.

Requirements

• Automated generation of marketing collateral to include aerial photos, blueprints, marketing copy, inventory, other