The Chaos of Content
Facing the Natural Boundaries of "Managing" vs. "Using"

According to Theresa, no single person is ever in charge... "unless you’re really, really lucky." Describe "lucky," I ask. "There are visionary organizations that view their content with great thoroughness. We have a customer whose HR group was tunnel-visioned on what they wanted to accomplish, rightly so. But they spoke to another group in the company that had a content management solution, and suddenly realized they could leverage that." What, I wonder, led them to this somewhat miraculous conclusion? "It was mainly because there was a directive from above," she answers. "There was one person who had a feel for how multiple organizations within the enterprise were attacking different types of problems, but had the guidance to go to other departments for advice. So ‘lucky’ in this case was having a person with an overall vision.

"We see it as a hybridization," Theresa continues. "We have an even split when it comes to the instigator. There are plenty of business owners who have a content-related need, and come to us for an answer. We have an equal number of IT folks who are tired of the business managers coming to them saying, ‘we have a problem and you need to fix it for us.’ IT gets that a lot," she notes.

The Holy Grail
This notion of a new combination of IT and business with a common goal seems to have legs, although we’re possibly chasing an elusive goal. "Everyone sharing from a single repository of content is a Holy Grail; you’re never going to get everyone to buy in," says Nav from InQuira. "You migrate what makes sense into the content management system, things that are high value, or things you just want to manage better. There are also things like product manuals that are better off in a product lifecycle management system. Or take a website for an example...you’re not going to move the website into a central content management system; you leave it where it is and let an effective search tool help you find things."

"There’s a stereotype that IT thinks of business users as uninformed, and the businesspeople think IT doesn’t understand what it’s like to be ‘in the real world,’ adds Theresa from ASG. "In reality, the walls that existed are starting to break down, and certainly will much more rapidly in the next few years. Organizations are looking closely at how their IT organizations help or hinder their business operations. Nobody wants to be the candy maker who had a bad October because they didn’t get enough product out for Halloween, or the manufacturer who didn’t get enough Wiis on the market last Christmas."

"We see three major themes when we talk to line-of-business people and their IT counterparts," says Paige Mantel of Interwoven. "Growth, brand and speed. In terms of growth, we see it mainly in companies who are trying to grow their on-line business. The business side says they can’t be competitive on the Web because they can’t create the best customer experience; they have a static, one-size-fits-all website, they think. They need to balance the power between IT and the business unit. So the business users themselves are looking for tools they can use to create the customer experience. And all the business units have their own needs. The IT people I speak to understand that, and are trying to put the right tools into the hands of their business counterparts."

Control With Empowerment
I’m beginning to get the feeling that nobody has a lot of faith in a "monolithic" ECM system that solves every problem. And so, with my weak logic, the notion of "enterprise" (with a capital "E") content management is further away than it was even a few years ago. "You’ve got to have good analytics and manage content, but you need to take a pragmatic approach about what you ‘put into’ the management system versus what you leave where it is," says Nav. "There are some kinds of content that are more formally created, and there are trigger points that send it into the management system." But, no, he concludes, there are many reasons that a one-size-fits-all ECM system is not necessarily the answer...but that doesn’t stop some people from trying. "There are two temptations that drive it. There’s an IT temptation to try to centralize; and the other is the vendor encouragement, because you’re locked into their system."

"Unlike other technology areas, the content management space is very consultative," adds Theresa. "There are lots of mitigating factors, as diverse as response-time, to access and security concerns. There are massively different factors that fall under ‘content management,’" she says.

"There is a natural inclination for us to maintain kingdoms—what’s mine is mine," adds Theresa. "The key is to have someone higher up who makes everyone play nicely together, but that’s rare. It’s a relatively new thing for most people."

"There’s a delicate balance between control, yet empowerment," adds Paige. "The issue of ‘brand’ is a perfect example. How do you centralize all of your brand assets, and use them consistently across all your channels? And with global expansion, how do you meet localized cultural needs in Japan as well as the US? How do you control, while at the same time leverage the differences, for all your brand assets?" And the answer to those rhetorical questions has unfortunately been to splinter, rather than coalesce. "If brand managers can’t get the resources they feel they need," Paige says, "they’ll just create their own, worsening the problem. So the trick is to maintain the delicate balance between getting what they need quickly, while still being consistent across the entire business.

"The counsel we give," Paige continues, "is to look at how you use content in the most effective ways in your business. It’s not about ‘maintaining’ content, or having a large content repository even...it’s about understanding how you put content to work in your day-to-day activities, and how you harness the power."

Harnessing the power of content is, it seems, easier said than done. Between the massive volumes that challenge the most well-equipped IT teams and the crazy new ways that knowledge is transferred that stymie the business managers, content has become the rose with the thorn. This KMWorld White Paper is a perfect example; the subjects here range from records management to knowledge transfer and back again faster than you can turn the pages. But please turn them, and read them, because if this group is correct (and I think they are) the future of your organizations will depend on it.