Enterprise Content Management Combines Content with Process

Content management, although it has only been a formal business model
for a short time, has gone through many permutations. In its most recent
iteration, it has become a three-letter acronym: ECM, or Enterprise
Content Management. In general, three-letter acronyms mean spending a
lot of money, enduring first-release software implementations, and
seeing a failure rate compared to that of the Chicago Cubs. ECM,
however, holds promise as a mature technology.

Early content management focused mainly on Web-based content, and was
used primarily by portals and publishing companies. More recent
innovations, however, add a significant amount of process management
into the mix, essentially capturing the "DNA" of how a company does
business -- managing not just the content, but also the processes that
are attached to that content. And what's more, Web-based content
management has become only one small part of this greater enterprise
focus.

The granddaddy of content management is a company called FileNET, which
has been around since 1982. They manage vast amounts of content in
various forms, within the context of a rigorous business process.
Financial services are an excellent example. An enormous amount of
paperwork and content of various types are involved in presenting any
type of a financial service, especially in a regulated environment such
as banking. That content must not only be stored efficiently, it must be
easily accessible and shared across multiple business processes. Actions
must be taken upon the appearance of particular pieces of content. More
business processes are involved in banking than, as my mother says,
"Carter's got little pills." And if you've ever tried to get one of
these fine institutions to lend you money, you know that they love
everything having to do with forms.

While FileNET is the granddaddy of content management, their client
Wells Fargo is the granddaddy of banking. As a result of record growth
in the company's Private Client Services group, the company was faced
with duplicate work and processing in each of the group's 200 offices.
Decisions often took multiple days, and most of that time was spent
hunting for those documents that banks seem to love so much. The bank
moved to a more centralized model of file management and storage using
FileNET's Panagon eProcess and Content Services to Web-enable many of
their administrative transactions.

In the sub-area of Web content management, the increasingly dynamic
nature of the Web is perhaps one of the most important components of
creating a highly functional and efficient system. In order to conduct
e-commerce, for example, most major Web sites must have a dynamic
component that creates Web pages "on-the-fly" in response to various
user interactions, such as placing an order or searching for a product.
How do you manage dynamic documents that are generated upon demand and
then evaporate just as quickly?

Although dynamic pages are not static HTML pages, they are tied to
distinct databases. FileNET, for example, manages those links, and
includes classic database connectivity that feeds information into the
results and then formats it into a Web page. The product can then
deliver that to a Web application server, for example, resulting in both
personalization and database interactivity, so that pages are dynamic
when they are brought up.

What's next? FileNET's Harris Hunt, Director of Product Marketing, has a
few predictions. In addition to the smaller players struggling for
survival and the larger ones getting stronger, the technology itself
will continue to evolve. In a nutshell, "more types of content being
brought together and managed together." Hunt also says, "We also see
things like digital asset management becoming integrated with other
content within the business. We've see things such as EAI, where, three
years ago, EAI was a standalone market. People were doing all the wiring
themselves to hook it together with their systems. That market is
vaporizing, and that's becoming a part of the underlying ECM
infrastructure."

Hunt also sees records management, which has been independent from the
rest of the world, coming into the ECM fold. "Going out further in time,
we see on the business process side, aggregation around things like
business analytics and modeling, advanced rules engine capabilities. We
see those folding into the ECM framework instead of being separate
architectures."