Making Enterprise Content a Sustainable Competitive Advantage -Special Report
New Options for Enterprise Content Management Take Shape -
IT Looks for Faster Deployment, Better Agility, Lower Costs
This is an excerpt from the special report on enterprise content management software comparisons prepared and hosted by SearchContentManagement.com. Download the full report here.
"There was a time when enterprise content management solutions were digital storage rooms – period. Today’s businesses, however, need to put all of that content to work to enable greater agility, productivity and cost control. With content literally everywhere, knowledge workers find themselves lost—unable to navigate their way to the content they need—or enable to harness content in a meaningful, useful, coherent manner. That’s where enterprise content management (ECM) comes in.
"Adoption of ECM has been accelerating in recent years, as companies look to put their content to work for business benefit. Whether that benefit is simply cutting costs by automating previously manual, paper-intensive processes such as loan applications or mining sophisticated data warehouses for critical customer purchasing patterns, ECM now is a mainstream solution. In fact, Gartner projects the ECM market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent, surpassing $5 billion by 2013. This white paper on enterprise content management software comparisons provides IT decision-makers with a schematic for understanding the new alternatives for ECM and making smarter decisions on purchasing and deploying ECM for their organizations, and offers insight into three leading supplier options for ECM platforms.
Making Smarter Decisions in Purchasing and Deploying Enterprise Content Management Solutions
Enterprise content management software solutions have actually been around for a number of years, handling content-based tasks from invoicing and Web site management to collaboration and compliance. But that’s been part of the challenge for organizations: In many companies, ECM has been a hodgepodge of disparate, disconnected tasks, ostensibly designed to share content assets but, in reality, rarely delivering on the promise of a content “fabric” woven throughout an organization’s applications and business processes. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for companies to discover, upon doing an applications inventory, that they had anywhere from a handful to a dozen or more separate content management software packages deployed in their organization for different tasks. Rarely, if ever, did these packages share content between or among each other, creating significant management complexity, stretching IT resources and wasting precious budget dollars.
More recently, ernterprise content management software vendors have begun designing and deploying multi-function ECM “suites,” acting as architectural platforms to support a common approach for content management across many functions. For IT staffs, that has been a big asset in their efforts to leverage all the content inside—and outside—their organizations, in much the same way Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages have promoted information-sharing among many parts of a business. However their ability to quickly implement these often ungainly and complex applications has been limited by tech resources, business priorities, and budget. Meanwhile business departments hunger for solutions that can be deployed quickly with minimal fuss and programming.
"The reality of many ECM suites has largely failed to live up to expectations. In large part, that has been due to the nature of the ECM software marketplace, which has been marked by rapid-fire merger-and-acquisition activity over the past several years, as some software companies have sought to cobble together task-specific, or even vertical-market, content management software into a comprehensive ECM suite. And, as any IT veteran knows, it’s one thing for a software company to expand its product line and broaden its capabilities by acquiring another company or its technology—and it’s another thing altogether to actually integrate that often-incompatible software code in a way that works seamlessly and provides an enhanced user experience.
"As a result, too many enterprise content management software platforms are difficult, expensive and time-consuming to deploy and often fail to achieve their stated business objectives for companies trying to get their hands around their content and make it work for them. Therefore, there are several important issues that IT organizations need to keep in mind when plotting an ECM strategy for their company, including evaluating their technology and supplier options.
ECM supplier options: Share-Point, OpenText, SpringCM
"Three of the leading options for companies looking to deploy comprehensive enterprise content management software solutions are Microsoft’s SharePoint, OpenText and SpringCM, the only Cloud ECM provider. Each offers different strengths and takes different approaches to providing the functionality IT organizations are looking to imbue throughout their companies. These companies’ different philosophies about how they present their ECM platforms to customers create important questions for IT decision-makers looking to match their resources and strategic direction with the right ECM technology solution."
Download the full report, which includes full comparison profiles of Microsoft SharePoint, OpenText, and SpringCM.
