Introduction
Content is the greatest asset of an organisation, yet in the past it is something that has been taken for granted. With data volumes doubling year-on-year, Butler Group believes that the lack of content management is already damaging the profitability of many organisations. Intense competitive pressures mean that any delay in publishing content can provide a competitor with an advantage.
We feel it is time that organisations examined their content assets and started putting a value on them. Content growth cannot be sustained at its current rate, and without putting some form of control in place to limit the content retained, companies will be unable to manage these most valuable assets.
Typically, organisations do not start to think about managing their content until it becomes an issue and starts affecting the bottom line. Butler Group believes that they need to be considerably more proactive, rather than reactive, and start planning an ECM implementation before they reach crisis point. An organisation that can take its time and assess the merits and costs of a wide range of vendors' products will derive much more benefit from a system than the company that has to make a quick decision and rush the implementation.
ECM vendors fall into three broad categories. The first of these are vendors that provide an ECM platform, and are situated very much in the infrastructure layer. They provide the capabilities to manage content across a broad range of content and external repositories, which integrate with external applications to provide top-level functionality. Vendors in this category include IBM and Fujitsu. Next there are vendors that provide content applications, and this includes many smaller niche players, providing functionality in such areas as Record Management and Web Content Management (WCM). Finally, there are vendors that attempt to span both camps providing the widest range of core functionality, but their solutions are generally more expensive and may include features that are not required by some organisations. This group includes Documentum and Interwoven.
Business Issues
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an ECM solution is an important criterion when investigating the different vendors. It is not just the up-front licence fees and any hardware costs that have to be taken into consideration. There are many hidden costs involved in the implementation of an ECM application. These include the cost of the implementation process, which can take several months, and cost as much as the product itself if it is undertaken by the vendor or a partner. Even if an organisation decides to go it alone with the deployment, there will still be costs associated with the length of time that its own staff is tied up on the project. Other costs include the training required, the cost of consultancy (even an internally implemented solution will require some level of outside advice), ongoing maintenance, and support.
Against this, organisations should also regard the savings that will be achieved by implementing the ECM system, and in this respect Return On Investment (ROI) is perhaps a better indicator of the true cost and benefit of implementing a system than just taking into account the TCO.
Other factors that need to be considered include the ability to integrate external applications to provide additional functionality, and external repositories that can be managed through the ECM solution. Butler Group believes that it should be possible to manage all content, structured and unstructured, through a single ECM solution, and organisations should be aware of this fact when purchasing an ECM system, selecting a product that can scale and evolve to meet future requirements. IBM and Gauss are already working towards this end, and Butler Group would expect major vendors such as Documentum, FileNET, and Interwoven to follow suit.
A major justification for implementing an ECM solution is the need to share information around the organisation. In the past, much of the knowledge within a company would have been in the heads of its employees, which is why employees were always regarded as an organisation's greatest asset. When an employee left the company, so did the knowledge he or she had acquired. Butler Group believes that we have become much better at recording our knowledge and expertise electronically over the last few years. However, much of this knowledge is still in the personal folders of the creator, typically destroyed when the employee leaves the organisation. Content management provides the ability to centrally store that knowledge and share it with other employees to the benefit of the entire organisation. This has made collaboration one of the key features of ECM products.
Technical Issues
ECM should be considered as an infrastructure component, rather than as an application. We believe that these products must provide a complete platform for the management of content, with which content service applications can integrate. This means that the key element of any such ECM system has to be its integration capabilities. Most vendors now support Web services to provide the integration layer, enabling the ECM platform to interact with content from a variety of sources stored in both content management and external repositories, as well as file systems. Butler Group believes that as more structured content is managed through the ECM platform, this need will become increasingly vital.
Currently, vendors providing an ECM platform provide content services via integration with external applications. Many of these are tightly integrated, so that an end-user will never realise that they are not using part of the core functionality. Vendors such as IBM use a combination of their own products and those of third parties, typically small niche players, to provide these content services, and Butler Group expects to see some of these products become embedded in the ECM platform and provided as core functionality.
At present, the major differentiator between ECM vendors is in the positioning of their solution as either content infrastructure or content services. The presence of vendors supplying a combined product is blurring this distinction, but we expect to see all the major vendors eventually providing this range of functionality, much of it acquired through the acquisition of niche players, rather than through internal development.
There are many features that we would expect to find in an ECM solution, regardless of whether it is providing a content platform or a fully featured application. There has to be a way of getting existing content into the repository, and a batch import facility is preferable, although it is something not currently supported by all vendors. We would expect content authoring tools to be present, document management functionality, such as check-in and check-out, version control, a rollback facility, a fully integrated search and retrieval engine, and workflow functionality to support at least the lifecycle of content.
Workflow is one of the areas that Butler Group feels to be contentious, and the one that provides a major differentiator between products as far as functionality is concerned. Some vendors include a comprehensive workflow engine that includes the ability to incorporate external workflows, allows complex branching and sub-processes, has a system of alerts, notifications, and escalations, and enables an organisation to define its own workflows. These vendors understand the close relationship between content and processes, and are beginning to combine ECM with Business Process Management (BPM). Others offer simple workflows that allow the management of documents through the creation, editing, and publication processes.
Market Analysis
Although the value of the ECM market is currently extremely buoyant, and will remain so, Butler Group believes that there are still too many vendors in this space. We therefore expect to see the current consolidation continuing, and vendors such as Oracle, BEA, and Microsoft may look to make acquisitions in the next 12 months.
Over the next few years we believe that many of the niche players will disappear, acquired by the large vendors with a global presence looking to plug gaps in their functionality. We would expect it to become more difficult to differentiate between the products offered by these large vendors, with the real differentiator perhaps being in the associated services offered.
In the early adopter phase of the ECM market, Documentum has been a clear leader, and is the vendor with which all the other significant players are competing. Many vendors who previously specialised in either WCM or Document Management (DM) have repositioned themselves to address the wider needs of the ECM market, but this is not always an easy task. We believe that Vignette and divine are the first two to emerge from the pack, with Stellent and Interwoven as further contenders, provided the latter stops believing it is a middle-tier vendor.
IBM has taken a visionary approach, defining a very powerful infrastructure for ECM, but the execution of its strategy does not yet match the ambition. Once its offering has evolved, IBM will be strongly positioned. Microsoft, by contrast, has not yet committed fully to this space. We do not believe that Microsoft's Content Management Server can be classed as an ECM product, but the company will undoubtedly develop a more aggressive strategy.
Der vollständige Bericht kann bei der Butler Group bestellt werden.