From Blind Date to Happy Marriage: Playing Matchmaker for ECM and Business Process
Having a set of defined services and an understanding of how to use them is a critical aspect of interoperability, but it must be combined with a comprehensive understanding of how the information about content—the metadata—can be used. One of the difficulties with finding and accessing information from multiple content management systems is the many differences in what metadata is available and how it is described. Part of the iECM Reference Model will include a definition of standard metadata elements. This will ensure that when content is accessed or shared by different systems that they will be able to preserve the metadata in the correct way. This combination of services and metadata standards will also enable applications to be able to search for and discover content that may be applicable to the current process. This will be possible because the applications will be able to use the metadata elements from all of the content management systems involved and bring the information together in a meaningful way.
The final piece of the iECM Reference Model is a definition that describes all of the contributing parts of a content management system including the services, the metadata models, the access mechanisms and protocols and even the repositories themselves. This is an important aspect of the iECM Reference Model because the content environment for each user is always changing. New systems are developed and deployed, old systems are eliminated, and the existing systems are changed. The applications that want the content from this systems must dynamically adapt to that changing environment and can do so only if all aspects of the environments are described and the descriptions are readily available. Another benefit of the component model is that it provides for different levels of interoperability support. Achieving interoperability will be an incremental process and there will be content management systems with varying levels of maturity and different levels of support.
The Benefits of Playing Nice
The creation of an interoperability reference model will provide organizations with the foundation to design and build more effective content-enabled solutions, with less effort and with a lower total cost of ownership. By having this standard, organizations can focus their efforts away from the low-value, high-cost activities associated with application and system integration toward ensuring that all of their people have access to all of the required content, regardless of its source. But the iECM Reference Model and its supporting best practices will permit organizations to do more than reduce cost and increase efficiency: It will enable the creation of entirely new types of applications.
The benefits of iECM are similar to the benefits that organizations saw with the adoption of SQL as the common language for database access. While the immediate benefit of SQL was the simplification of the applications that used databases, the more significant benefit of this standardization was in the creation of new classes of applications. These new applications were able to do things that would have been too costly to create without SQL, but the new applications applied the standard in ways that had not been considered before. iECM is at a similar point. By providing a foundation that enables the use and management of content across multiple systems, iECM lays the groundwork for new and innovative ways of adding content to organizational process—and for all of the benefits that come from new ways of thinking about content and information.
These benefits extend to organizations of all sizes and in all industries. For many large organizations the value and importance of the iECM initiative is already obvious. They have many different content management systems and have the immediate need to have these systems connect with each other and share content. The same is true of many government departments and agencies. They have immediate, sometimes mandated, needs to share content across organizational boundaries. But the value of iECM extends to smaller organizations, which may only have a single content management system. These organizations can benefit from interoperability because they are part of a supply chain. They have customers, partners and suppliers, each of whom has their content management systems. Today, these organizations exchange content using email, creating multiple copies of critical documents, such as contracts. By using an interoperable enterprise content management system, they would be able to link their systems to those of their customers and partners. This linkage would permit easier interactions and would reduce costs, while increasing effectiveness. For many organizations, this level of interaction and service will become a critical competitive advantage.
The Recipe for a Long-term Marriage
Content needs to become an integral part of all organizational processes. This requires that the enterprise content management systems be able to provide their content to all of the processes and people inside and outside the organization. Standing in the way of this need are the technical difficulties and the effort required to make that happen. The iECM Consortium is working to develop the standard for content interoperability and to provide the information needed for organizations to take advantage of that standard. By doing this, the iECM Consortium will enable the creation of new applications and new ways of doing business.
If you would like more information on this important initiative, or would like to participate in iECM activities, please visit the standards section of the AIIM website (www.aiim.org).