Enterprise Content Management: Are You Content With Your Content?

"It's also important to realize that IT is not simply taking orders from the business," adds Mary Leigh. "IT will have to manage and maintain whatever systems support ECM initiatives, and if a desired requirement (such as a service level agreement) will require far more hardware, staff or software to support it than the budget allows, there will have to be compromise. Criteria for success as well as plans for continuous improvement must also be addressed and agreed upon by all stakeholders in this governance board," she insists.

"We deal with that all the time," agrees Theresa. "And what I am surprised to learn is that the person driving the purchase and implementation is at the departmental level. They are the ones with the major problems, and so they are being tasked to solve them. And the way it happens is this: someone on the C-level finally gets tired of hearing about the departmental director complaining all the time, so they just throw up their hands and say ‘OK... just go fix it already. You know what you need. Here's your budget. Just go do it.'" (Probably with an implied, "...and shut up and leave me alone.")

Does this sound familiar? The departmental director takes the order and goes out and buys a solution for his/her specific problem and, bingo, you have a new silo. "Yep, you have a new silo. We still haven't seen an overall comprehensive view emerge," says Theresa. "And that's supported by the analyst reports. They say the ECM market is being broken down into component elements, based on the specific benefits of the solution... not the opposite. I think we may see that trend persist. Customers will continue to seek out the best-of-breed solutions for the problems they encounter. There may not be a one-size-fits-all solution. Ever. To think that there can be an end-all/be-all solution may be an immature view of the world."

And, in the end, it may all come down to money. I ask Mary Leigh whether businesses view ECM as a money-making or a money-saving initiative. "Especially in today's economic climate, we're seeing more and more that projects don't get funded unless they improve the overall bottom line of the company—either save OR gain more than they cost to implement. Doesn't matter whether we're talking ‘value creation' or ‘cost savings.' It's not hard to understand that if implementing a system will cost more than the dollar value of productivity gained in the desired cost-recovery timeframe, the likelihood of the project moving forward is slim," she says.

"If there is any hope..." suggests Theresa. "...if there's any opportunity for a true change agent that supports the ideal of all things talking together... the standard that has potential is the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. Having lived through the database world, and seeing how something like the ODBC really helped to standardize the interchange of data between very different databases, I think that CMIS has the potential to do that for content management systems. It's still in kindergarten right now, but as user feedback leads to newer versions of the CMIS standard, it should be a teenager in two or three years."

So there you have it: Interoperability=good, but very difficult. Change=good, but very scary. ECM=good... someday.