Content Management: The wood from the trees

When is Content Management not Content Management, wonders Ian Moyse, and puts forward some evaluation criteria.


26 June 2001, 2 pm GMT

The Market for 'Content Management' is getting more confusing by the day for the average customer who needs to discern the right solution.

Document Management companies, for example, have recently re-branded themselves as Content Management providers, much like the rebranding exercise that helpdesk companies undertook when they started using the term CRM about a year and half ago.

Getting associated with the latest hot technology area makes sense for analysts and financiers, but for customers it causes confusion and blurring of the lines between different solutions and technologies.

With the proliferation of solutions that is coming across, choosing the 'square peg for the square hole' is difficult, as it is to
identify and match solutions to needs.

Customers must first understand the options on offer and carefully describe their objectives and true business needs. Only then can a correct technology and product decision be made.

The market can be segmented into the following six sectors.

In this article we suggest to align possible classes of requirements to classes of solutions.


Web Team Collaboration Tools


Tools selected as an appropriate solution, stem from the question "are we having delays on publishing due to inefficient and unreliable practises within the web team, leading to publishing bottlenecks and costly mistakes?"

Here, typically, the client has a strong web team that needs empowering.

The web team beeds to maintain an isolated development branch where they can make adjustments without affecting the production web site, then automate the process of integrating the approved changes back to the production web site.

This is not a content management approach, but a development tool requirement providing change control and technical tools.

These products work well if the web site is managed in the same way that software engineers build software applications. Having sophisticated branching allows the programmers to maintain their own isolated environment and edit with any tools they want, the merge functions making it possible to combine and reconcile changes between differences in branches.

For these tools to be successful and the correct choice, key members of the process must be technically orientated as merging branches is done at the HTML level. These cannot deliver content management to the business, as they do not offer the concept of users, roles or business rules as an integrated part of the content delivery process. They are unresponsive to business change and do not empower the business user.


Web based CRM platforms


Here the customer's question is "are we losing revenue and customer opportunities by failing to maximise acquisition of quality leads, monitoring customer satisfaction, measuring results and following up consistently?"

The solution for the client in this situation is to integrate transactional sales and support information and delivery capabilities to achieve a closed loop, 360 degree view of the customer.' This is definitely not solved by a traditional content management solution. Siebel and Oracle are key movers in this market space, but others are also focusing here. These solutions tend to be of high cost, project driven and long term, involving large company resources and commitment to get them off the ground and live.

Some business functions in CRM are out of the box, but most require substantial implementation and modification to be useable by the business in question. For web centric vendors, a unified data warehouse is still a pipe dream, involving a lot of development at site.

If, as a customer, you are looking for an application server you should look at Microsoft (ASP) or IBM (Websphere) for example and if you truly want CRM in depth consider a vendor like Siebel.


Document management (DM)


Companies with vast arrays of knowledge being created and stored in the form of documents, definitely require document management solutions.

These companies will be typically under-utilising information by not collaborating in the creative process and not sharing the content of the documents effectively.

It is useful to be able to distinguish between document management vendors positioning themselves as content management, or vice versa.

Document management solutions provide very good support for integration into word processing and publishing applications.

They allow documents to be chopped into discrete components that can be distributed for collaborating authors to work on.
DM products are also good at re-purposing content for multiple distribution channels (non-web) and their integration with conversion technologies allow them to provide easy delivery into a web based format.


Guerrillas


The primary problem faced here that drives these providers is that business people in the organisation wish to be able to publish the content they need to make the business successful.

These solutions, typically from small and often start-up vendors, provide custom development to allow business users to create web based content.
Most of these solutions are stuck in the dark ages, focusing on removing the webmaster bottleneck to publish from users.

They have a lack of exposure to mainstream sites and typically cannot cite large reference names, thus reducing their ability to develop reusable components; thereby emphasising their reliance on custom developed solutions to each client.

The solutions here are unreliable, take a long time to show benefit to the business, and are difficult to support and beg to question the financial viability of the vendor.


In House Developed Solutions


It is easy to think of content as simply text or graphics which can be updated via a set of static web forms. However, that is only the tip of the iceberg. From a business perspective, content also includes information on participant (user) rights and responsibilities, business rules to govern who can see and make certain amendments, formatting and context determining presentation, metadata to aid intelligent indexing of content and so on.

Even simple and "straight forward" textual content must be handled both ad-hoc and as pre-defined information: dynamic as well as static content, on-the-fly as well as scheduled, objects as well as pages and template style sheets to ensure content consistency.

Furthermore, effective content management requires that all this is wrapped within an easy-to-use interface, so that business users can manage the various elements of content in a point-and-click manner.

A considerable amount of time, effort, dollars, database expertise, information gathering, planning, development and testing would be necessary to build and support this level of functionality. Why invest the time and assume the risk when the work, in many cases, has already been done?

Building a "one-off" solution from scratch puts the burden on the clients, exposing them to significant risks. Software development is not a one-time effort, and is much more than just a matter of coding. An effective solution requires thorough planning, architecture, design, usability, development, integration, testing, maintenance and ongoing enhancement. It also requires extensibilit