Content management for the branch

Recently, we at Nemertes Research have been focused on the challenges of content management; specifically implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system and flow that supports our widely-distributed office environment. Even though we're a small business, based on our work with large businesses, it's clear we all face the same fundamental challenges. These challenges include:

What you have vs. what you need: The reality of ECM is that most organizations still rely on their enterprise e-mail solution as their content management solution. E-Mail is the lifeline for organizations and therefore, it’s the easiest base for content management. Easiest doesn’t mean best! E-Mail as an ECM has a number of shortcomings, including: no inherent workflow, poor change management control, storage limitations, and compliance issues.

Document Management vs. Content Management: Where do you draw the line? In reality, our main focus is on workflow and document management. Yet, it’s impossible to isolate documents from content. In particular, as organizations move toward unified communications, content, documents, workflow and collaboration are all merging.

Best vs. Good Enough: What’s really needed to meet the needs of the corporation? In our case, we can move very far along the good, better, best continuum by implementing workflow and document management that integrates with our e-mail system. This only gets us part of the way to a full ECM, but it gets us far enough to see justifiable returns, quickly.

As organizations grapple with these issues, they also must choose an architecture for ECM. A primary consideration is whether or not to run ECM in-house or to adopt a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. We see high enterprise interest in SaaS as a model that supports distributed and branch office operations. In Nemertes Service Oriented Architectures and Applications (SOAA) benchmark, 50% of participants plan to integrate full-application SaaS with their SOA. Much of the discussion with participants centered on integration of SaaS-based CRM. Could SaaS-based ECM solutions follow in the footsteps of Salesforce.com? In the next column we’ll look at SaaS options for ECM and how they tie back to the challenges listed above. Stay tuned!