Understanding Enterprise Content Management

Why does Content Management matter so much?

There was a time when businesses were satisfied with just able to put information on a website. That time has passed: Organizations are today understanding the value of content and the ability to leverage it for different audiences and purposes. Companies today have varied modes of content distribution to their customers and partners; the common ones include multiple internal and external websites, portals, paper, CD-ROM’s and wireless applications. Businesses today have no way of ensuring that the content is current, consistent and appropriately personalized. Instead they have systems that require extensive human intervention in order to make the information available, re-purpose it or verify it’s correct. Ironically, while the objective for each of an organization’s portal or website was to simplify access to relevant information, and cut down on information overload, most of them have traded the problem of ‘information overload’ with ‘information inconsistency’. Organizations today repeatedly face bottlenecks because they need IT staff to be involved in putting information on their website or removing the outdated material. As listed below, the challenges faced today by teams managing the content are much more than earlier:

* Users are no longer content with the static content: As the Web has matured, the expectations of Web users and Web providers have increased dramatically. Users expect an engaging experience from the Web, expecting the sites to easy to navigate, easy to use, visually interesting, and interactive.
* Change is rapid: Electronic content must be current and must be updated to include the latest information about the company and its products. One of the major problems that companies face today are that the product life cycles are short, requiring them to update or make changes to marketing and sales related material more frequently than earlier. On the other hand, the content delivery cycles are continuous, meaning that once the content is updated, the process must start again.
* Content is core of business interactions: Most companies now today have adopted the Internet as a primary medium for doing business with their customers, increasing the importance of visual design, graphics, accurate text and business logic in managing their user interactions.
* New business models are creating new demands: The internet has created an active market for buying and selling content. Today there are media houses, which create content and deliver it to other businesses for inclusion on their own websites.
* New channels for content distribution have emerged: Web content is no longer created only for distribution to a single web site. Companies frequently manage websites for different users including employees (portals or intranets), partners and customers and content is distributed through narrow band and broadband access to wireless and other applications.
* All these problems are much more than mere inconveniences. Organizations have realized that content inaccuracies are potential business liability and that the content should be made as productive as possible. Organizations should enforce quality control on content, assess content’s purpose and plan how content can be most effective. This would not only allow them to be consistent in their content delivery, but also allow them to provide same experiences across all customer touch-points.