Taming the Content Tiger
Make Your Organization Competitive
Because, really, it’s all about ROI. In the final analysis, business is business, and WCMs are simply yet another tool in a company’s "Web arsenal." If a particular tool helps an organization achieve or exceed its goals, then this tool should be considered. The benefits of WCMs are many, from enhanced competitiveness by offering customers an exceptional Web experience, to openness and scalability made possible by combined WCM/portal solutions.
While there are several models in the market today to calculate ROI, here are five key areas that must be addressed.
1. Leveraging information: Organizations have invested many years and millions of dollars in making sure that key systems are in place that allow them to run their business smoothly be it HR, finance, manufacturing operations or even documents and files. Organizations that treat their content strategically as information, rather than as static or dynamic content, can achieve better business outcomes. Companies that want to improve their competitive position are looking for dynamic and intelligent approaches to create-publish-measure-improve content so that the right information, from disparate sources, is available to the right people to make the right decisions at the right time.
2. Enabling business flexibility: In these changing times, business flexibility that delivers exceptional user experiences and significantly reduces costs is key to long-term success. In fact, many customers we speak with share their struggles with repurposing their information to different outlets such as for websites and mobile access by their employees, customers and partners. A flexible infrastructure, with a single delivery model, will reduce cost over time by enabling organizations to leverage existing investments and achieve sustainable growth.
3. Empowering people: One of the topics that gets the least attention while calculating ROI is the cost savings and the increase in productivity when businesses give their employees and customers the ability to take more ownership of information. Giving customers and content owners the power to manage their own information helps customers in a couple of ways. First, lines of business, closer to the customers, can take faster action to respond to customer needs. Required then are easy to use tools, such as step-by-step templates, to enable content authors to quickly create, deploy, and maintain Web content. Similarly, providing rich content editing capabilities that mimic commonly used word processors reduces training costs and accelerates adoption by business end-users. Furthermore, end-user management of content frees IT to concentrate on the technical, operational and strategic aspects of supporting and managing websites, thus using the IT skills more effectively.
Second, if organizations can deliver persuasive content-based websites with personalized and targeted information to end-users, this will increase return visits, improve loyalty, and open the aperture for more revenue.
4. Governance and risk management: Every organization that publishes information to the Internet is exposing itself to risk. The content published must comply with corporate guidelines, be reflective of corporate policies and direction, and be refreshed to stay up with changing market conditions. In dealing with WCM technologies, users should focus on making sure the WCM solution can help them effectively manage the risk of keeping content current, and not be distracted by whiz-bang features they might end up not using. Capabilities, such as role and profile-based access to content, workflow management, version control and ability to integrate these capabilities across myriad technologies are fundamentals that impact effectiveness and costs in governance and risk management of web content.
As previously mentioned, website templates combined with ease-of-use technology can significantly impact the speed and effectiveness for organizations to deploy a more streamlined online presence. If these templates can be married to industry-specific policies, best practices, and governance processes, the benefits to organizations will be accelerated. IBM offers industry toolkits as additional aids to dramatically speed time-to-market and reduce deployment costs of WCM/portal-based solutions.
5. Optimizing your infrastructure: Another variable in ROI calculation is the cost to optimize your infrastructure such that everything works smoothly with minor or minimal effect to your organization. Large companies are already addressing this with a common and scalable architecture and security model. It is important for small to mid-sized businesses to look beyond immediate needs of creating and maintaining a small footprint on the Internet and consider how they can better leverage an online presence for growth.
As you know, nothing beats quantifiable returns in securing executive board support. IBM customer TRI-WEST realized such returns:
- Better customer service and improved business agility;
- Increased productivity for sales reps on the go, saving approximately US$750,000 per year;
- Eliminated VPN and associated software support costs, saving US$130,000 per year; and
- Drastically reduced direct mailings, saving US$57,600 in the first year.
Or is it really all about people? Any organization is only as good as the people associated with it, be they employees, business partners or suppliers. WCMs enable organizations to better empower their most important assets... their people. Imagine information technology that empowers instead of limits, that truly is the sum of its member parts. Then imagine combining such technology with an open and scalable portal platform that expands such empowerment throughout the organization and beyond... to business partners and suppliers.
A true game-changer in the past couple of years is the proliferation and wider adoption of social technologies. With easier access to the Internet and these social tools, the average visitor can now make their voices and opinions heard. This should be taken seriously by organizations that want to find ways to convert these Web site visitors into a long pipeline of loyal consumers and partners. Organizations should also consider integrated web analytics to better understand user behavior on their Web sites with the analytics feeding an adaptive infrastructure that responds dynamically to usage patterns and optimizes the visitor’s Web experience. In response to customer inquiries, IBM is currently working on initiatives to provide a self-optimizing portal to do just that, i.e. to sense, analyze, and automatically respond based on usage or behavior detection of site visitors.
Given the fast pace in which information is accessed and shared, WCM vendors could keep adding more portal-like capabilities to WCM solutions. But WCM is becoming a fundamental part of portal solutions, driven by user demand for exceptional Web experiences. Times of change represent opportunities for organizations to tune in to the forces of change. Now is the time to get acquainted with the robust Web-based solutions available today.
For more information, visit www.ibm.com/lotus/webcontentmanagement or send an email to TransWCM@us.ibm.com.