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Market Shifts Toward Infrastructure Vendors

Content management is becoming part of enterprises' infrastructure and consequently is being delivered by large vendors of enterprise infrastructure such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

IBM, Oracle and EMC are competing at the high end of the market, while Microsoft is commoditizing the market at the low end. Recently, HP entered the ECM market by acquiring Tower Software, a niche vendor long known for its integrated document and records management.

More than 54% of the market, as measured by total software revenue, is held by just three vendors — EMC, IBM and Open Text

Pure-play content management vendors and vertical-market specialists such as Interwoven, Xerox, Xythos Software and Vignette are fighting to compete. Bright spots for the pure-play vendors and vertical specialists are the mid-market and CEVAs

IBM and Oracle have the potential to drive the market forward by creating a powerful message based on broader enterprise information management (EIM). Since they own the key stack components, such as the database, the information access, business intelligence (BI), analytics and reporting tools (and often line-of-business applications), they can bring together structured data and unstructured content. On the other hand, choosing a suite from a stack vendor may involve tradeoffs as some functional components may not be equivalent to best-of-breed offerings.

Of all the infrastructure vendors, Microsoft has driven the most change in the ECM market over the past 18 months with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

Adopting WSS or MOSS for mass deployment, and an ECM suite for high-end, content-centric processes and best-of-breed Web content, will remain a useful strategy for enterprises during the next three to five years. This coexistence strategy could reduce the costs and some of the risks of content management for an entire enterprise.

For many organizations, the need to increase workers' productivity and innovation is more important than ever. Critical goals include improving users' Web experience and connecting workers to relevant content and to each other.

see "Report Highlight for Dataquest Insight: E-Discovery Market Drives New Search, Content and Records Management Investments"

Specialists like Interwoven and Vignette are moving into Web-based CEVAs and interactive marketing and customer experience. They remain among the few choices enterprises have for high-end, enterprise-class, externally-facing Web content management (WCM) solutions. In the mid-market, Hyland Software, SunGard Data Systems and Saperion use their imaging and archiving heritages to address transactional content applications such as medical records, claims processing and accounts payable invoice processing.

Integration/Federation Grows in Importance as Organizations Look to Establish an Information-Centric Infrastructure

The ideal ECM architecture would enable one repository, or a few repositories with a common database — but this is not an ideal world. Dealing with multiple, siloed content repositories is a fact of life for many organizations. In Gartner's 2008 survey of nearly 400 respondents (see Note 1), 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories.

see "New Standard Will Make Content Repositories Interoperable"

Enterprises keep a vast amount of information locked up in documents, spreadsheets and other forms of unstructured data ("content"). To maximize the value of this information, enterprises need to integrate the various types and stores of content, integrate content with structured data, and integrate internal content with content and structured data outside the enterprise.

XML is becoming increasingly important for content creation, component management, output and integration with other applications. The term "mashup" has become synonymous with content couplings that were formerly difficult to achieve, even with traditional integration resources. Enterprise mashups that integrate content with business application data or with Web content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or APIs remain rudimentary compared with the explosion of consumer mashups.

IBM intends to deliver ECM-focused widgets for creating mashups as part of the FileNet P8 platform.

User Empowerment vs. Governance

A Range of Needs Leads to Application Specificity and a Fragmented Focus From Vendors

Social software encourages informal collaborative activities that fall outside the traditional scope of transactional applications, formal workflows or engineered teams. The rapid growth of social network interactions and the desire for open innovation will require IT organizations to develop a new approach that balances the need for corporate security with the requirement to accommodate frequent customer and partner conversations. IT staff will still be expected to manage this content at the back end of the life cycle.

Wikis, blogs, podcasts and instant messaging have become staples in many enterprises, especially as marketing tools or as means of communicating with customers, prospects, employees and partners.

Enterprise and information architects should assess how able their ECM vendor(s) are when it comes to providing Web 2.0 features or integrating with third-party solutions for collaboration and communication to avoid creating more content silos. Usability remains a critical characteristic of perceived success or failure for ECM.

Interwoven, Open Text and EMC are among the ECM vendors focusing development efforts on increased support for mobile clients, such as BlackBerrys and the iPhone, and for offline capabilities.

Today, however, all this content creation and sharing typically happens outside any formal content management strategy. Organizations should take advantage of evolving, richer user interfaces and tools for content creation, consumption and multichannel output.

Alternative Delivery Models

The capital outlay required for ECM, and the internal resources needed to implement and maintain ECM suites, can be daunting. It is not unusual for an organization to spend $1 million or more on software and services for a large deal. In a 2008 survey (see Note 1), 22% of the respondents indicated they were spending over $1 million on content management software purchases in 2008, while 14% were spending between $500,000 and $1 million. In addition, it can take at least six to 18 months to deploy an ECM application.

Gartner clients are increasingly asking about SaaS, shared services and open source as alternative delivery approaches to implementing on-premises, commercial software. Yet the penetration of open-source and SaaS solutions today represents less than 5% of the overall ECM software market (based on total software revenue)

Market Definition/Description

Gartner defines today's ECM suites as encompassing the following core components: Document management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents. Document imaging for capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents. Records management for long-term archiving, automation of retention and compliance policies, and ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance. Workflow for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails. Web content management for controlling the content of a Web site through the use of specific management tools based on a core repository. It includes content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management, and content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers. Document-centric collaboration for document sharing and supporting project teams.

Though not explicitly identified as a core component, information access, or search, technology has always been a critical component of an ECM suite, and it will play an even bigger role in helping companies sift through structured and unstructured information. All ECM products ship with a search engine embedded as a core component, so that users can create a full-text index and search the content stored in repositories. Most ECM vendors re-license the search engine from another provider, typically Autonomy-Verity or Fast (see "Q&A: ECM and Information Access Technologies Grow Ever-More Entwined").

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Interwoven

Interwoven has increasingly focused its strategy on being a best-of-breed content management vendor, with a strong message around Web-based and vertical-specific solutions.

Although Interwoven has all the core ECM capabilities and related components such as DAM, it delivers and emphasizes these as stand-alone offerings for different business scenarios. The suite is only loosely coupled, and cross-selling opportunities are limited.

Gartner believes that Interwoven's future lies in high-end WCM, analytics and marketing solutions. It can continue to carve out a successful position with its consistent marketing messages and Web-based solutions, but this won't be easy given the increasing competitive pressures and changing market dynamics. Interwoven must continue to penetrate the accounting, legal and professional services markets and expand into adjacent markets such as the government sector — otherwise, like others, it faces a stagnant future in the traditional document and records management arena.

Microsoft

More so than any other vendor, Microsoft has driven ECM market transformation with SharePoint 2007. Microsoft has brought BCS to the masses by bringing the cost per seat down and tying simple content management to the familiar desktop tools that users use every day.

With MOSS 2007, Microsoft provides an integrated product suite that provides at least basic capabilities in the six core ECM functional components, along with portal and search capabilities. The fact that it is built on the Microsoft stack will appeal to a broad range of organizations for whom Microsoft is a strategic partner.

While MOSS 2007 has attracted interest and gained some traction as a records management tool, a WCM solution and a platform for building CEVAs, it still has to mature in these areas.

Feedback regarding large, decentralized deployments of MOSS 2007 indicates a need for improvements in scalability and in management and replication functionality. Microsoft has begun providing tools and published guidance to address these challenges.

Microsoft must continue to ramp up support, training and partner certification as there is a clear "skills gap" between the demand SharePoint has created and the supply of well-trained implementation personnel.

Objective

Objective, an Australia-based vendor, has a strong vertical-market focus on the public sector in Asia/Pacific and Europe

The Objective suite, which has evolved through development rather than acquisition, is well-integrated and addresses the core ECM functional components.

Historically, Objective has delivered most professional services itself, rather than through partners. Recently, it has begun to establish relationships with major system integrators, but it needs to expand further and extend this partner channel.

As much as we dislike it, people live in their inbox and this fact is not going away over night by telling them about the benefits of using social tools! Given the lack of appropriate tools in the past, people have grown accustomed to (ab)use email for everything, e.g. public conversations (e.g. cc'd), collaboration, awareness (e.g. newsletters, updates), connecting with others.

Alerts are another tool in your content control arsenal. Any wiki user may request an alert at the wiki or page level.

One aspect of SharePoint wikis that is not readily apparent is that each wiki page is a specially formatted Web-part page. As such, given the appropriate permissions, you can add your own Web parts to create a hybrid wiki page. At my firm we've used this trick, in conjunction with a custom workflow, to automatically add Web parts to each new wiki page as it is created

The adoption and use of wikis within law firms follows an evolutionary path from indifference to skepticism, to partial, then full adoption. The rate at which a firm moves along this adoption curve will depend both on how quickly legal professionals embrace the belief that collaborative authorship can efficiently produce high-quality reference materials, as well as how effectively technical professionals implement the tools for control and organization of the authorship process that lawyers demand.

Document management is all about workflow, control, and risk mitigation. Its objective is summarized perfectly by the two words in its name: "documents" and "management". It got its start in the legal departments of pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned to make sure that their companies were producing documentation in full compliance with regulatory requirements. A DMS thrives where there are a) documents already being created as part of a business process; and b) those documents need to be closely checked in, checked out, supervised, edited, approved, and stored following a consistent and audit-proof process.

Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.

When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records.

What I'm saying amounts to this: Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate.

unfortunately SocialText is not very good at linking to the documents in the obvious place (attachments).

What Have Law Firms Done?

Even with these IT and KM investments in law firms, it seems the frustrations remain: I can't find anything. It takes too long to find what I need.

What is ‘The Answer'?

the focus of law firms over the last decade has been absolutely correct: to concentrate on people and processes through KM, and on new information technologies and tools through their IT budgets. But maybe there's a third prong that's been missing from this focus? The messy middle: the content assets, the actual information itself contained in documents, e-mails, web pages, blogs, journals, books, video and podcasts etc.

The huge investments for enterprise search - providing lawyer and legal information professional alike with a single search box sitting over multiple repositories and offices - have certainly seen great improvements in uncovering information within a law firm.

Developments out there on the Web in faceted search (e.g. filtering a search for cameras by brand, price and resolution) have begun to seep through the walls of our firms and organisations.

Enterprise search has started to uncover some of the mess that we didn't even know was there. As well as showing, rather too starkly, the mess that we haven't wanted to deal with over the years: the poor tagging of content with useful terms or even consistent terms across different repositories; the lack of rigorous info management processes to identify the valuable, useful and re-usable information, or equally, to identify the duplicate, out-of-date or inaccurate information.

law firms are now thinking and willing to invest in ways to actually clean and fix some of this information mess. Reviewing and improving a firm's Enterprise Information Architecture (or Firmwide IA) through an information housekeeping initiative is becoming a priority. What does that involve?

Well-defined and understood business rules and workflow for the firm's information and knowledge are essential components to Firmwide IA

Systems & Tools

Information & Information Architecture Assets

Governance

The benefits of investing in Firmwide IA and these four themes, may be broadly stated as:

What happens now?

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following: Optional Free of up-front workflow Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities Accepting of many types of data