Historically, organizations have implemented content-management solutions to address specific departmental needs, such as retrieving images of invoices in accounting, reviewing contracts in legal or publishing Web content within marketing. These solutions:
- originated to solve departmental problems. Often these systems have been procured at the departmental level from different vendors providing essentially the same technology, while at other times departments have needed different solutions for managing specific content types, such as images, electronic documents, Web content, computer-generated reports, etc. Although implementing systems on a departmental basis may have created vendor management challenges from a corporate IT perspective, retrieving content within a department has been relatively straightforward from a user perspective because content solutions historically have been designed and implemented to address departmental needs.
- but increasingly span cross-functional processes. As organizations increasingly shift from departmental processes to cross-functional business processes, users and applications need to gain access to content across multiple departments and business units. Gaining access to content across the enterprise is difficult because of the traditional focus on departmental systems, particularly if content is stored in different vendors’ systems. Quite often, reading and updating content in another system in another department is simply not possible. In other situations, content systems may be integrated on a point-to-point basis using APIs for custom integration, but at considerable cost for the systems-integration effort and raising issues about maintaining the system of record.
- did not address all content sources within the department. Realistically, most unstructured content is not stored and managed in document management, Web content management, document imaging, and other ECM systems. Instead, much of the content created and used within departments may be found in collaboration tools such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, file systems, packaged applications like ERP and CRM systems, and external content sources such as LexisNexis. Departmental systems or ECM solutions that span the enterprise typically do not integrate with these content stores.
When integrating content repositories through custom integration other problems can arise in addition to costs and maintaining the system of record, including:
- Integration must be maintained over time.
- Custom integration may affect upgrade decisions.
- Access to content is not bidirectional.
- Integration is point to point.
An alternative to custom integration is content migration, but it is both expensive and time-consuming.
To meet business needs for content integration across an enterprise, a new class of software is now emerging that gives organizations access to heterogeneous content repositories across departments without extensive systems integration or migrating content to another repository. Key characteristics of this market include:
- Content integration emerges as a new software category. Content integration is a layer of software that integrates ECM system(s) and/or custom and packaged applications with multiple, heterogeneous content repositories and other unstructured content stores.
- ECI vendors are striving to virtualize repositories. With either published APIs or Web services, the goal is to virtualize content repositories inside the enterprise – or outside the firewall for partner extranets – so that content can be searched, viewed virtually, checked in/checked out, annotated, updated, and versioned.
- But it’s still a small market. Currently, content integration is a small, nascent market with annual revenues of less than $50m on a worldwide basis. The best-established pure-play ECI vendor, Venetica, is still a relatively small company, despite having been in the ECI market since 2000 and achieving some large-scale implementations in major corporations and government agencies. Other pure-play ECI vendors, such as Context Media and WindFire Technology, have entered the market more recently. Vignette and Day Software have offered ECI with their Web content management products for several years, but there is still relatively low market awareness of their content integration capabilities. Similarly, IBM has offered Information Integrator for Content (and its earlier versions) for several years, but that product is used primarily to integrate IBM’s ECM products and has not been implemented widely to integrate external content repositories. However, as interest in ECI grows, more companies are now moving into this market. For example, Mobius entered the ECI market last year with its acquisition of Cytura, and Documentum has just announced its acquisition of the askOnce business unit of Xerox Corporation. (Currently, the askOnce product focuses on federated search and does not yet support bidirectional integration.)
- Other ECM vendors recognize the need. Filenet, Hummingbird, and Interwoven have partnered with Venetica, which has raised Venetica’s profile in the market and has increased overall awareness of ECI as an ECM software category. Similarly, IBM has partnered with Context Media, and Xerox has partnered with Documentum (formerly askOnce) for its DocuShare product. More ECM vendors are expected to follow suit during the next 12 months, as their customers begin to realize that content integration is a critical component of ECM.
- Integrating repositories is a real problem. Recent research shows that a number of enterprises already identify content integration as a pressing ECM need. One of the major factors influencing that need is the number of repositories that must be addressed when retrieving information throughout the enterprise. For example, when asked how many repositories are used within the organization for storing unstructured content, 43 per cent of the respondents in our survey used more than five content repositories, and of those respondents, 25 per cent had more than 15 repositories. The challenge in gaining access to content from multiple repositories increases when the repositories are from a number of different ECM vendors or involve repositories for multiple content types that have not yet been integrated within a single vendor’s product line.
As enterprises begin to focus on managing and retrieving unstructured content across multiple departments, many organizations are now standardizing on a single ECM vendor that can support multiple content types, ranging from document images and electronic documents to rich media. These organizations correctly anticipate that, over time, ECM vendors will integrate the various repositories within their own product lines. But even if an organization selects a single ECM vendor for enterprise content management, gaining access to content from legacy systems will still be an issue. Three scenarios that often spur organizations to implement content integration solutions are the need to:
- gain access to content following mergers and acquisitions; Case in point – Integration versus migration. One financial services company needed to consolidate quickly the unstructured information in three different content repositories to optimize its customer service operations. The company considered migrating the content into a single system, but this approach would have cost more than $1m, would have been very time consuming, and would have required retraining 2,000 users on a new system. Instead, it spent $300,000 to implement ECI from Venetica, which was completed within three months.
- integrate business applications with content; Case in point – Savings from content integration software. For example, the financial services company cited above decided to extend its Venetica system to support integrating multiple applications with multiple content repositories. In the first project, the cost of deployment was reduced by approximately $1.75m; the cost of deployment for the second project was reduced by $1m. These IT savings were particularly impressive because the Venetica investment had already been cost-justified by the merger project previously described.
- reuse marketing assets across the organization; Some entertainment and media companies are beginning to implement ECI so that departments and independent business units can re-use marketing assets across the enterprise. From a cost perspective, this reduces the amount of time and effort spent by different departments to recreate digital photographs, logos, and graphics that already exist within the organization. But even more importantly, reusing content can enable organizations to develop marketing campaigns faster and more effectively, which contributes to revenue and market-share growth.
When an organization is faced with the need to retrieve content across repositories, the recommended action plan is to:
- conduct an audit or inventory of content repositories. This may sound daunting but can be done at a high level without too much difficulty. The inventory should identify all the content sources needed to support key business processes. Content sources could include document management systems, document imaging systems, Web content management systems, records management systems, digital asset management systems, file systems, collaboration tools, external sources, and packaged applications.
- define an action for each repository. The options are to do nothing, integrate the repository with another content system or business application or migrate the content into another repository. Factors influencing the decision include the underlying technology used for the content repository, and the importance and quality of the content itself.