Krishna: The problem is that a company such as Chase has thirty, forty, fifty lines of business. Organically what used to happen is every line of business had its own approach to following the content management problem. So, basically, they said, "OK, well, I've got a problem. I'm going to get this system to manage it. I'm going to get that designer to build templates for me. I'm going to get this design house to help me do that stuff. Well, I need to have a work flow, so I'm going to put together this set of steps in my work flow, and I'm off and running." And so, what happened was, during the course of a year or two, every line of business had its own approach. They had their own designs, their own infrastructures, their own workflows, and it was quite a big mess. It was not a situation with a common look and feel, a common workflow, a common infrastructure, an efficient use of resources and skill sets, in order to fundamentally manage the process, not on a departmental basis, but on a global companywide basis. That class of content management problem is something that involves multiple divisions, size and scale, and in many, many cases, it involves global reach as well. In the case of Chase, they're using this approach to content management to also now run a Brazilian Web site, a Spanish language Web site, and a Japanese Web site. So, it's really a sort of content management in the large. If you were to take the departmental approach [in a corporate merger], then you'll have an even more severe problem in terms of being able to organize content across all these entities. So I think that it's our approach, and it's our feeling, and we feel quite strongly that it's important to take much more of a strategic approach to the way in which they think about the content management problem. We elevate [content management] up the organization so that it can be addressed at a strategic and corporate level rather than at the departmental level."
InfoWorld: Are companies addressing the issue at a high level and corporatewide?
Krishna: The good news is that everybody recognizes that they need to have a content management system in place. The bad news is that content management has not permeated through the organization -- up the organization -- and has in general happened only in a relatively small number of the leading-edge enterprises. I'm afraid that the industry has not gone far enough to recognize this as a strategic issue.
InfoWorld: How do you define the process of managing content?
Krishna: [We define it] in terms of content management and delivery. In other words, it is the whole end-to-end process of acquisition, collaboration within the enterprise to be able to manage the content, and then the dissemination of that content to the Web site, to partners, to channels, to syndication, and to other organizations. It's a large, end-to-end problem.
