The Motor or the Fan?: ECM Moves From Pure-Play to Every Day

Here's the organizational part: "Centralized processing remains very healthy and plays a very important role in decentralized capture. Let me explain: Centralized capture is still the method to get a large amount of paper documents into a business process. But a lot of times, such as in a hospital environment, it's less efficient to gather up paper documents and ship them to a central site than it is to simply scan them at the point of contact with the customer. Sometimes these documents get processed at the local level, but more often they are sent over high-speed connections to the central processing system, where the facility is ready to handle that document."

Dean continues: "The business process is similar to the old-fashioned way; the vehicle is just different. Capture is now serving the organization from multiple points. And, the content serves multiple purposes—legal sees it one way, marketing sees it another... but it's the same content."

That is the same theme, played through a different instrument, that the Xenos people were telling: "Leveraging the value of your document content throughout the enterprise is key," says Paul Walker. "In the past, ECM may have been applied just as a way to meet regulatory compliance. Now organizations realize that the content locked away in those risk-mitigation systems has huge value in other ways. A policy or statement in a compliance repository could be made available for use in the customer-care department...or to the customer himself, for that matter."

"The key is providing both," adds Xenos' Graham Barker. "Having the cost reduction and risk avoidance value proposition at work AND also provide leverage for future growth. That's the differentiator."

ECM For Us All

"Traditional ECM treated content as an island," says Christine Mason, CEO and founder of SpringCM. "We think it's more of a network. You can't lock an ECM solution behind a firewall and get the most out of it."

Christine's company is one of the emerging players in the "software as a service," or SaaS, marketspace. She determinedly insists that not only is content an island, it's too often a fancy rich-person's island, and that's not helping the majority of customers who can benefit from ECM. "We thought we could extend the benefits of ECM out to a much broader market and penetrate at the edges of enterprise. SaaS is about the democratization of enterprise applications—it solves problems for so many users who were disenfranchised."

Disenfranchised in what way? "At the heart of SaaS is the fact that risk shifts from the customer to the vendor. When a customer signs up for SaaS, the vendor works the live implementation; there's no risk to the customer that the product won't do what they want it to do, there's no risk in hardware or integration, nor in time-to-availability, because the day they decide to go live, they're live and working. Secondly," Christine continues, "accountability is on the vendor, to over time prove that the customer is getting the ROI they expected. The SaaS provider has to own up to whether it's what the customer really wanted, or whether it's shelf-ware."

And what they want is an enterprisewide deployment of content management...right? "I don't believe that ANY enterprise content management systems has EVER been deployed enterprisewide," she counters. "Every customer I know who has an ECM solution has four of them. They tend to be departmental no matter what.

"The way to differentiate between ‘enterprise' and ‘non-enterprise' is: Are you able to answer all of the necessary questions the CIO has IF he wants to go enterprisewide? Scalability?...security?...Web services and SOA accessibility?...integration-friendly?...customizable?"

So the distinction is not whether the application is instantly applied throughout the enterprise, but whether it could be? "We don't see the IT department until we're already deployed in the third or fourth department. Then they get wind of us, and we have to go through the ‘enterprise dog-and-pony.' The trick is to anticipate that," she says.

While we're on the subject of IT's role...can it still be said that business calls the shots? Or has IT, as the man behind the curtain, taken over pretty much every deployment decision...at least as far as ECM is concerned?

"If a businessperson has a problem to solve, he's going to IT to get it solved. But there is no longer room in IT for a person who creates a project just for solving a single problem," says Stellent/Oracle's Andy MacMillan. "We're seeing more of a director level in IT who solves the business problem by building on top of the infrastructure. ECM still has a strong value proposition for the business owner, but it's the IT person who is making the decision. And if he makes the case correctly, he can convince the business owner that IF he can stand up applications more quickly, in a more robust and scalable way at a lower cost, then it's good for everybody."

I circle back to a comment at the top, where I said that ECM has almost been assimilated into applications. Here's the exception: "There are some people who think of content management in a discrete, standalone way," says Paul Sonderegger, VP marketing for Endeca. "and they're the owners of IT infrastructure. IT can say ‘we need ECM.' Because IT has to think in terms of the lowest common denominator across the enterprise, the large pieces of infrastructure. They're isolated from business in that sense," Paul says. "That infrastructure then gets used by specific individuals who have specific goals. They are—and rightly so—focused on doing their jobs."

It's the Long Tail of content management—lots of people using existing content in personal ways, the vast majority of which are not the same. "It doesn't make sense for IT to set up proprietary, completely unique applications of the constituent technology for each of the divisions of the business...and yet, each of the divisions of the business HAS different needs. That's the challenge!" explains Paul.

"It's like running a restaurant...you have 100 people coming through on Saturday night, and they don't all want hamburgers. But you CAN have a range of meals that can come out of the kitchen and satisfy the vast majority of your customers. The challenge for the chef is: what is the smallest set of ingredients that lets me satisfy all those individuals? IT has to think in terms of an aggregate infrastructure; business sees it as a whole bunch of individual processes. This conflict never goes away. IT has a requirement to see commonality when it can, but also has to serve the individual needs of the business."

And life is never easy. But maybe the following essays can put content management into a perspective that—at least—makes you glad you decided to eat out tonight.