Social Computing and Collaboration in the Enterprise
If a content management system is so hard to use that it’s not worth the trouble, no one benefits. ECM can only contribute to the enterprise objectives of lower costs, reduced security and compliance risk and improved strategic use of information—including collaboration—one desktop at a time. A change in the content management paradigm is clearly in order. The incorporation of Web 2.0 interfaces and capabilities in the ECM stack can increase user adoption while reducing ECM’s total cost of ownership and improving information governance.
Social Computing and ECM
EMC believes that social computing is part of a broader trend that has been gathering momentum for more than a decade: the steady convergence of information, people and process. We see a blurring of the lines separating ECM, business process management (BPM) and social computing, and that truly innovative value can be found where these areas intersect. When it becomes seamless to pivot between content, people and process, it becomes faster and easier to find useful information, stay connected with dispersed co-workers, view work in progress through the lens of business processes and contribute content to those processes. Our name for this capability is correlation services.
The next generation of content management platforms will take steps along the road to providing seamless access to correlation services. These platforms will be able to make life easier and more productive for knowledge workers without sacrificing the controlled management and attention to compliance the enterprise requires. To do that, they must incorporate:
The Web 2.0 client experience—The ECM client of the future will enable KWs to—easily—do things like create blogs and team wikis. It will support personalized information views as well as team and individual workspaces. KWs will have one-click publishing capability and the ability to manage tasks and projects via a powerful yet friendly interface.
More intuitive and productive search—Knowledge workers need to find information wherever it exists—inside a managed repository or beyond. But as important as finding it is the ability to visualize the relationships between different types of information. Next-generation content management systems will enable intelligent filtering of, and guided navigation through, multiple information sources. Thumbnail views will become the standard way to view any kind of search results. This user-centric ECM will also permit KWs to easily tag and classify items for the benefit of others.
Access to content and content services through virtually any application—Many KWs spend their days working from one or two core applications. Whether it’s Microsoft Excel, Word or Adobe InDesign, they are much happier (and more productive) if they can stay in that application and still search for, find and access the information they need and collaborate with others.
Secure and compliant information management—Security, retention and governance are the three things that keep IT managers up at night. But future ECM platforms will deliver these behind the scenes—pervasively but not intrusively. They will enable "any time, anywhere" access while securing content outside the enterprise via information rights management. And they will feature a scalable infrastructure that makes them enterprise-ready.
As an industry-leading content management vendor, EMC is putting ease of use and Web 2.0 capabilities at the top of the list in developing next-generation content management systems for knowledge workers. To learn more, visit
www.emc.com/solutions/business-need/collaboration/index.htm.
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