ECM for the Rest of Us Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget

Enterprise content management (ECM) is one of the most widely used terms today in the market for software applications. Industry analysts consistently put it right behind security in terms of interest from their customers. In fact, you've probably been told that you need an ECM solution if you've been charged with any of the following tasks:

• Create a centralized place for corporate documents, enabling end users to easily search and retrieve information;

• Find faster ways to update Internet, intranet and extranet sites without sacrificing accuracy;

• Ensure the correct use of logos and corporate brand elements;

• Provide compliance with legal and regulatory requirements for retention and retrieval; and

• Create electronic versions of paper documents (e.g., invoices).

Each of these challenges points to lost opportunities that organizations face daily, as is evident from the following statistics:

• 81% of business activity is content-driven;

• 90% of customer communication (and hence customer satisfaction) is content centric;

• 60%-80% of knowledge workers can't find the information they need; and

• 90% of the creative work done by knowledge workers is actually recreating work that already exists.

"Re-Evaluating" Content Management

It's likely that your organization stands to get a lot out of ECM, but what should you look for in an ECM solution? Today, many ECM solutions claim vast feature sets that promise to increase efficiencies, save costs and drive revenues. For instance, there are many higher-end ECM solutions that: provide common library services to multiple corporate repositories; support most types of unstructured content; provide extensive customization to meet specific needs; enable business users to find and reuse content quickly; provide a library of applications tailored to specific industries or business issues; and provide extensive scalability and high performance, availability and reliability.

Higher-end ECM solutions promise champagne-class feature sets. However, these solutions can carry hidden costs that impose new infrastructure on IT staff, require high, ongoing professional service fees, and force business users to endure long implementation periods before the system is usable. In fact, if you can't spend seven figures, you're unlikely to get the attention you deserve from many of these vendors.

On the other hand, lower-end ECM systems can offer limited out-of-the-box features for a beer budget, but they often lack both the flexibility and scalability to keep pace with your specific, evolving needs. Therefore, if you seek a champagne ECM feature set, most vendors will tell you to either pare down your requirements or come up with a bigger budget. However, neither of these options is appealing. Luckily, you don't need to sacrifice one for the other. The key to getting a champagne feature set at a beer budget lies in considering how an ECM solution is delivered in addition to what features it advertises.

ECM for the Rest of Us: Balance is Critical

A new category of ECM products has emerged to satisfy those organizations that have the champagne tastes for comprehensive and customizable ECM capabilities, but demand the fast implementation and affordable price required by a beer budget. These products, such as Percussion Software's Rhythmyx™ Enterprise Content Management System, balance substantial out-of-the-box feature sets with the customization flexibility to meet evolving needs using in-house skill sets.

Balanced ECM solutions deliver out-of-the-box features for immediate value, offering the following benefits:

• Deployment is rapid, since the system ties into your existing infrastructure rather than adding a new platform.

• Business users enjoy fast results without relying on customization services to make the system operational.

• Users adopt the system quickly, with little training, by leveraging familiar interfaces as well as features that are integrated with popular products such as Microsoft® Office.

• Business-focused capabilities allow for extensive content reuse across delivery channels.

Balanced ECM solutions also provide the customization flexibility required to achieve future goals. Customization capabilities are placed in the hands of your IT organization, allowing them to adapt the solution to changing requirements and new projects. When you need to further customize the system, a standards-based architecture allows IT to leverage their existing skill sets to meet specific requirements. An extensible ECM foundation sits on a single code base to support all facets of content management.

If you seek fast time-to-value and comprehensive, extensible capabilities, selecting a balanced ECM solution is a wise decision. In other words, with balanced ECM, you can have "champagne tastes on a beer budget!"

The Balanced ECm Solution

• Out-of-the-box capabilities for immediate results;

• Scalability to support all enterprise content across multiple delivery channels; and

• An extensible foundation that sits on a common code base to address all facets of content management.

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Percussion Software's Rhythmyx ECM is uniquely designed to give organizations the best of both worlds, offering the perfect alternative to inflexible, out-of-the-box, low-end products and expensive, high-end products that take too long to implement. A robust, scalable solution, Rhythmyx manages Web and portal content, documents, digital assets, and scanned images. More information is available at www.percussion.com