The Elephant in the Corner
The Subject Might Be Content, But the Conversation is Larger

John also sees it as a "peer-to-peer" exchange, with line-of-business managers making decisions they feel are best for the tasks at hand. "We try to look for independent software vendor (ISV) partners who have traction in certain areas, and provide departmental solutions to mid-tier companies through them. It’s a different approach than the ‘software suite’ approach. Our customers don’t want an overall suite; they want to solve their contract management problem, or their accounts payable problem, or their HR materials problem...today. That’s what they’re buying. They are not looking for a ‘content management solution’; they’d rather have something off the shelf. The business owners have a sense of urgency to get something done relatively immediately," says John.

Theresa agrees, but identifies a difference between those mid-tier firms John talks about, and larger organizations who have a broader mandate. "Content management is considered strategic only in those companies that are mature in their use of content management. Less mature companies—ones that are just getting started in CM—tend to hold onto their siloed repositories longer, and are thus farther removed from a counterpart in another part of the organization who might be doing a similar thing with content," she says.

The difference between those immature companies who do not have a viable content plan versus the mature ones that do "may well be the defining factor for their futures," warns Theresa. "We may see a very different landscape in one or two years as a result, what with companies asking employees to do more with less, and this economy asking everybody to do more with less. Different departments should be polling one another to see where they can gain economies of scale, and also what they can get rid of."

Lubor states it firmly: "Content management is absolutely an enterprise initiative. Different companies are at different levels of maturity and understanding of this fact. But we’ve reached the tipping point, where most CIOs understand the need for an enterprisewide initiative around content," he insists. "That said, from a pragmatic go-to-market point of view, it almost always starts with a point solution in a department. What’s important is if the vendor can address that exact dilemma AND have an enterprise suite that can grow. It must also not be a monolithic architecture, where we try to boil the ocean. The trick is to have a modular suite of products, that can be integrated on a defined layer, and to pick-and-choose and grow at your own pace."

He continues: "Don’t fall into the trap of thinking all ‘departmental’ solutions are automatically siloed, discrete ones. Just because it’s an accounts payable solution doesn’t mean that many people in the organization won’t need access to it. If you’re shipped a new laptop, you need to be able to go into the AP application and confirm receipt. So many people touch many so-called departmental applications. The real point is avoiding the costs associated with siloed applications. There are a lot of administration requirements, system integration costs, hardware and underlying software, even training requirements for the end-users. So separate applications that lack a common integration at the familiar user level have all sorts of downside."

"The biggest Fortune 100 companies—Amex, Ford—have a heterogeneous mix of applications managing various aspects of their content," insists John Gonzalez. "Their Web content is managed by one system, their transactional content by another, their business communications content by another system... there’s not a uniformity among the stack of content systems. BUT it can be said that this consolidation of solutions is managing the content of the enterprise. So is that ‘ECM?’ I suppose, but I can tell you that the days of one-stop shopping for all those solutions have faded."

Theresa sums it up: "The trend is toward federating the access to all information, while leaving it in their original repositories (as opposed to constantly having to move it into a new bucket.) You want to look for technology that allows you to bridge the gaps, rather than try to jump over the gaps."

If the articles on the following pages have any shared purpose, it’s to help the reader "bridge the gaps" Theresa talks about. Please take the time to consider the advice offered here, and work to determine how—in these trying times—there might be solutions that solve your business problems AND make life a little easier.