Content-enabling Your Business Processes

Successful enterprisewide content management is a highly desirable yet elusive goal for most organizations. Savvy senior executives realize that adoption by employees throughout the enterprise is essential in order to maximize productivity, raise service levels and address regulatory compliance requirements. Traditionally, software complexity, cost and resistance from the user community have hampered attempts at true enterprise deployment. But companies are discovering that with the right technology foundation based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), they can take a simpler and more economical "low-hanging fruit" approach by content-enabling critical business processes first. Using Web services to integrate appropriate content management technology into everyday enterprise applications, it is possible to achieve immediate benefits in terms of streamlined processes, improved service levels, lower costs and reduced business risk.

Content and Related Business Requirements
Industry experts agree that unstructured content is doubling in volume annually. This includes documents and forms (both physical and electronic), spreadsheets, presentations, emails, instant messages, rich media files and more. Analysts estimate that unstructured content typically makes up 80% of business information.

Content is often subject to little or no control and scattered over many file servers and individual computers throughout the enterprise. In this silo environment, it can be difficult or impossible to find or access specific content. Without proper management of changes and document versions, employees can't be certain that they have the latest or most up-to-date information. This lack of control and inability to find content is particularly disturbing in view of the increasingly high risk posed by requirements for regulatory compliance and legal discovery.

Content management is often viewed in terms of these daunting, and growing, problems. It is also helpful to look at it in terms of content-related business drivers, i.e. what does the business need to do:

• Accelerate or streamline business processes;
• Reduce costs—for lines of business and for IT;
• Manage business and legal risks; and
• Comply with regulations, e.g. Sarbanes- Oxley, HIPAA, SEC, Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

In an analogy to driving a donkey with a stick while enticing it with a carrot, regulatory compliance is the stick—and is a major content management driver itself. According to a recent AMR Research report, to comply with external mandates and internal policies and procedures, organizations worldwide will spend $27.3 billion in 2006, $8.8 billion of which will be on technology—and this doesn't show signs of decreasing anytime soon.

Continuing the analogy, cost savings and more efficient business processes represent the carrot for driving content management initiatives. In the above research report, 75% of organizations surveyed indicated that they would use investments for compliance to support other business activities, and streamlining of business processes topped the list of benefits sought.

It's useful to bear in mind that most content is generated and used in conjunction with business processes and departmental/group projects or activities, so there is a business context within which specific content is relevant. Understanding this business process context is essential to proper organization, categorization and attribution of myriad content types in a content management system, and is the key to leveraging content in everyday business operations.

Traditional ECM: Not Enough, or Too Much?
Enterprise content management (ECM) has evolved from early initiatives to manage documents in highly regulated environments such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace industries. Today's ECM technology offers broad, extensive and highly specialized functionality that should be capable of addressing any content management requirement; however, efforts to achieve true enterprisewide adoption of ECM have generally failed.

Many organizations have successfully implemented ECM to support the needs of selected groups or specialized applications, but only a small percentage of employees throughout the enterprise have adopted it. With so many functions and options, traditional ECM often appears to present too much technology, with a learning curve that most users would prefer to avoid. The cost and complexity of using most ECM systems can preclude true enterprisewide deployment, and knowledge workers' resistance to behavioral change can be an insurmountable cultural barrier.

Suppliers of ECM solutions have struggled, often unsuccessfully, to find a workable answer to this adoption dilemma. Part of the answer is that the content management solution must enable scalable, manageable, secure and affordable deployment to serve thousands or tens of thousands of users. Part of the answer is that the solution must offer a simpler user experience with little or no learning curve for the average knowledge worker. But in many organizations this is still not enough.

To achieve true enterprisewide adoption, it is essential to integrate the content management technology seamlessly into business processes and applications so that content can be accessed and shared by the appropriate people. This enables individuals and teams to collaborate around content naturally in the context of the business process, without the necessity to stop what they're doing and switch context to enter a different application environment or third-party collaboration application. Providing knowledge workers with the ability to access and collaborate on content from familiar application environments is key to achieving mass user adoption.

An Ideal Foundation: Service-oriented Architecture
The evolution of SOA has opened up a world of possibilities in the design, development and deployment of information technology applications. SOA is enabling a new generation of content management software solutions, and in fact is the basis for the design of Oracle Content Services and Oracle Records Management.

In software solutions based on SOA, applications execute specific business logic by consuming reusable Web services that are universally available to all applications. IT organizations have been quick to recognize that one area in which SOA can save significant time, effort and cost is application integration, including the integration of functionality into existing applications.