As times change, the marketplace finds new reasons for applying enterprise content management (ECM) technologies. Compliance is a relatively new rationale, and now we are also seeing increased use of ECM platforms as a basis for application development of content-aware business applications. Nevertheless, most of the time, enterprises turn to ECM to reduce costs and bring information overload under control. Indeed, with digital information mushrooming faster than most enterprises can manage it, ECM projects have become a cost of doing business.
Technology solutions to business problems that are associated with the production, storage and distribution of information have historically gelled around different types of management software. But today, the lines between these product segments have seemingly become quite blurry, and there is consequently broad confusion around what is increasingly being called ECM.
Compounding this confusion has been the rapid expansion of feature sets among ECM vendors to capture larger market shares or simply lay claim to an ECM mantle. While some companies have taken a partnership approach, particularly among the more niche-oriented vendors, the marketplace as a whole has seen substantial convergence, consolidation and overlap. This, coupled with vague yet expansive marketing information, can make it difficult to discern the core capabilities of the solution a vendor may be offering. To navigate through this growing ECM market, we have translated some of the biggest terms buyers might see:
- "Enterprise-level" function-point solutions: This could be a very big document management, digital assets management or web content management implementation that crosses departmental silos, and it essentially promises a highly scalable approach to a common, practical need. This is a nice strategy in theory, and some large, cohesive enterprises (especially in the tech sector) have executed successfully on it. However, we see some backlash against this approach today in some areas for financial reasons and because the implementation times across multiple silos can be highly impractical. For imaging projects, enterprise consolidation can make a lot of sense, but for web content management, the business case remains less obvious. At the same time, many enterprises are beginning to provide content management as a central service to different business units. In any case, this definition means that any large vendor within the management software sector could call itself an ECM player (and many of them do).
- Combined functional solutions: The idea here is to combine various functions under one management umbrella. This is what Gartner tried to promote as "Smart Enterprise Suites." As a strategy, it speaks to vendors such as Oracle, IBM/FileNet, Open Text and EMC, who have assembled nominally integrated functional solutions under one brand. In reality, the individual products are often marketed and sold separately, and in many cases, the offerings are often far from integrated. Moreover, it is not at all clear that the marketplace actually wants combined suites even when the vendors have them. An indicator of this is the fact that despite years of pushing the logic of unified web and document management, very few buyers have ever implemented such systems because they (rightly) see them as separate entities. Today, most ECM projects are sold and implemented at the departmental level.
- Ubiquitous content: This school of thought says that ECM is not an application but framework for making content as accessible as possible to the right people, from wherever it lives, and that the prime function of disparate repositories is to feed the right information in the right format to key line-of-business applications that truly drive profitability. Many enterprises want to experiment incrementally here, even if the fundamental concept of "content anywhere, anytime, any format"f remains highly utopian. Nevertheless, we believe that understanding ECM as a framework for threading together content-rich applications across the enterprise is a useful way of trying to obtain more value from heretofore isolated function-point solutions.
With the movement of Oracle specifically into this space, we are seeing ECM repositioned as middleware. Essentially, ECM components are served as functionality that sits between the application layer and the database/storage layers. The idea is that within service-oriented architectures (SOA), ECM services become available and ubiquitous via an enterprise service bus (ESB). The reality is that most ECM vendors' tools are internally tightly bound such that services-oriented ECM remains more of an ambition than a reality. Nevertheless, IBM is responding to the goal, as are Microsoft and EMC. Another illustration of the ubiquitous content approach is provided by Open Text and EMC. Until recently, both touted a "big suite"f approach to ECM, yet both are now repositioning to provide archiving services and repository management for large federated environments.
Selecting the right technology to meet your specific needs is no easy task. Reliance on Magic Quadrants or big brand names is not the way to go - the only way is to research deeply, both locally and internationally, amongst the very wide range of systems available. A good place to start is understanding the vendors' evolution as it relates to product development. The market leaders continue to represent some of the highest risk to buyers, in terms of product stability and corporate change (IBM, EMC, Microsoft), due to continued rapid development of new product features and the difficulty of digesting acquired assets. Mid-market and small specialist vendors today typically represent a lower risk in terms of both product and corporate stability (e.g., Hyland Software, SAPERION, EVER Team, Laserfiche, Xythos Software, ISIS Papyrus and KnowledgeTree, among others). Beyond this, you need to research carefully and deeply amongst the many options out there. ECM is such a broad and sweeping area that failure to select the right technology can result in an equally broad and sweeping failure.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe [aps@cmswatch.com] is a principal at CMS Watch, an independent research firm, covering ECM technologies and practices. An 18-year veteran of the document technology industry, Mr. Pelz-Sharpe has written extensively on document, web and records management topics. |
