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 The
Summer Of Our Content
Most Workers Are Drowning In Documents. But Is
''Content Management'' The Answer?
By Doug Bartholomew
June 11, 2003 - CFO Magazine - "Content is king," or so went one
of the most common clichés of the dot-com era. But as companies generated
ever more "content," all that Web-site verbiage, not to mention reams of
internal reports and other documents, started to seem less kingly and more
of a royal pain. Often it can be so difficult to locate and adapt a product
brief or marketing report that you know exists somewhere in the corporation
that it's actually faster to create a new version.
Enter "content management," a technology category that got its initial
foothold in helping companies manage all the information they were posting
to their Web sites, but that has now expanded to address everything from
annual reports to spreadsheet templates. Content management, or enterprise
content management (ECM), can be thought of as a grand index and repository
of every piece of corporate information you might want to get your hands on
and reuse.
As three-letter abbreviations go, ECM doesn't have a fraction of the name
recognition of its big-ticket brethren ERP or CRM, but it will get a boost
later this summer when Microsoft releases its Office 2003 suites of desktop
applications. The Professional Enterprise Edition, which is aimed at
businesses, will offer a new application dubbed InfoPath (heretofore known
informally as "XDocs"), an "electronic forms" application that will bring
some aspects of ECM to the masses.
Meanwhile, Adobe Systems Inc. is addressing ECM and related
document-management issues, having teamed with SAP last year to configure
its Acrobat product to display in document form information that resides in
SAP applications. And such longtime ECM specialists as Pleasanton,
California-based Documentum Inc. hope the new visibility the space is about
to enjoy will open companies' eyes to the value of soup-to-nuts ECM suites.
Corporations will pony up more than half a billion dollars this year for
software to manage Web content alone, according to Frost & Sullivan, a
consulting firm in San Jose, California. Jarad Carleton, an analyst there,
says that while separate products now exist that address Web content,
internal documents, digital rights, and other areas, there will be a push to
integrate all these functions under the rubric ECM.
(Info)Path of Least Resistance
Microsoft's InfoPath can't do everything, but it can give users a taste
of ECM. Anyone who has used the Wizard feature within Microsoft Word to
create a résumé or fax cover sheet will understand the idea behind InfoPath,
which extends that concept to facilitate the creation of a variety of
templates that allow a worker to create invoices, expense forms, bills of
lading, health-care forms, and a vast number of similar items.
Once specified, fields from a form can leverage rules allowing them to
validate against a database to make sure that an order form, for example,
doesn't contradict company policy on minimum order size or pricing. InfoPath
forms are XML documents that can be sent on to a variety of databases or
posted on Web sites.
Possibly more important, InfoPath can act as a data-query tool for
tracking down information a company has tucked away in its electronic
cellars. "We see InfoPath as a front end for gathering many types of
information," says Bobby Moore, product manager at Microsoft. In fact,
finding the right document, form, or data when you need it may be the most
business-worthy feature of any ECM.
"Finding and reusing documents is critically important," says Harry
Vitelli, vice president of business development at San Jose, Calif.-based
Adobe. "Companies can lose a great deal of time because they can't find
crucial information assets. You only want to create those assets once."
Health-care giant Kaiser Permanente even uses ECM technology to make
information available to patients, allowing them to check on appointment
times, site locations, physician information, and more via a Web site.
Adobe is now integrating its Acrobat technology with SAP's applications
to make it easier for, say, an SAP CRM user to view sales data in an Adobe
PDF-formatted document and to then send that document to others. Most SAP
customers currently use SAP's own SmartForms technology, a set of templates,
to create and manage forms within SAP applications. While they are likely to
continue to use SmartForms, the standard formatting of Adobe's documents
greatly facilitates sharing them.
E-Biz Boost
Companies that already have ECM systems in place think they're
definitely worth the investment. "The project we have in Iraq will get a
great deal of scrutiny, and one of the advantages of an ECM is that it
provides us with an audit capability to know what happened," says Darrell
Delahoussaye, portfolio manager of engineering procurement construction
systems at Bechtel Corp. in Houston, which uses Documentum to keep track of
all of its documents and files worldwide.
Another ECM fan is Corporate Express Inc., a leader in office supplies.
"We leveraged our enterprise content management system to help us do more
than $1 billion in E-business in 2002," says Wayne Aiello, vice president of
eBusiness Services at the Broomfield, Colorado, firm. A $5 billion North
American operation with an average order size of $150, Corporate Express
uses ECM to not only present vast amounts of data on its Web site but also
store and access millions of invoices. The "paperless office" is still a
fantasy at most companies, and only about 20 percent of the millions of
invoices Corporate Express generates each year are handled purely
electronically. For the rest, "a lot of documentation results," says Aiello.
Carleton of Frost & Sullivan says that in the near term, it's a buyer's
market. Larger companies are offering customers deep discounts on long-term
maintenance and service contracts, which could lead to a shakeout. Longer
term, he believes that vendors will have to make the software easier to
install and use in order to drive down implementation and consulting costs.
Despite the price pressure and success stories, however, most companies
don't feel a compelling need to spend big money on ECM. Not only are times
tight, but the inefficiencies ECM addresses are often so baked into an
organization as to be almost invisible. Whether Microsoft's InfoPath opens
people's eyes to the further possibilities of creating documents and forms
quickly, finding them, and reusing them remains to be seen. Companies that
are currently content with their content may rethink their approaches. Then
again, a recent online job search for "file clerk" returned hundreds of
openings. |
