The Long Tail of Enterprise Content
Getting A Handle On It
Organizations have applied the 80/20 rule in addressing the challenges posed by the vast amount of content and other digital assets created in the course of doing business. They have generally focused their efforts on the 20% of content that is considered "valuable." Valuable content has been largely determined by: 1. Risk mitigation, in case of lawsuits; 2. Compliance with regulations such as SOX; and 3. Business process automation. To address the content that meets these three criteria, organizations deployed advanced enterprise content management (ECM) systems such as IBM FileNet and EMC Documentum. Access to ECM systems was highly controlled and use was limited to a handful of employees in the organization.
With the release of SharePoint Portal Server (SPS 2001) and other portal/collaboration software, employees began to collaborate in ways they were unable to in the past. SPS 2001 and its successor, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), essentially democratized the distribution of content with its ease of use. The lightweight workflow feature, "Document Library," and basic versioning/version history tracking capabilities brought content management to the masses. Because the deployments were limited to the departmental levels in the organization, central IT groups did not pay much attention to SharePoint until it became so widespread that most of the "valuable" content that ECM systems were deployed to cater to was no longer finding its way to the advanced ECM systems. The spread of SharePoint presented not only infrastructure/support challenges for central IT groups, it was also a potential risk management and compliance nightmare. Organizations are now reining in the uncontrolled deployments of SharePoint by incorporating MOSS 2007 as a critical part of their IT infrastructure and planning. However, addressing risk management and compliance challenges is going to take more effort and additional investments in enterprise content integration (ECI) solutions in order for companies to leverage the capabilities of their advanced ECM platforms and the years of investment (business processes, retention policies and compliance) built with these platforms, while allowing employees to collaborate in the knowledge-creating activities which drive innovation and business results.
Vorsite, in working with organizations faced with these challenges, has developed a portfolio of technology assets and methodology to address the challenges with which these organizations struggle. Customers are now leveraging their investments in advanced content management systems, such as IBM FileNet, EMC Documentum and MOSS 2007/Microsoft Search Server technologies, to meet their enterprise content management/business objectives.
The Long Tail
Chris Anderson coined the term "The Long Tail" to describe how the Internet has made possible a world in which the combined value of modest sellers (in the world of movies, books and music) equals the sales of the top hits. "The Long Tail" concept is similar to how Microsoft Office and SharePoint technologies have created a new world of enterprise content in which the combined value of the content not currently contained in advanced ECM systems is equal to the value of the content stored in the systems.
On the X-axis of the graph is the amount of content and the Y-axis indicates the value of the content as defined by the organization. This value will vary across organizations and between organizations. Examples of value to consider include 1. risk factor; or 2. regulation factor.
The head of the graph is where you will find content that an organization considers high value. Access to this content is restricted; a retention policy is applied and it generally participates in one or more business processes. This has been the domain of advanced ECM systems such as IBM FileNet or EMC Documentum.
The "long tail" of the graph, which contains the vast majority of the content created in the enterprise, is the domain that MOSS 2007 currently occupies.