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Through the fog... Corporate content management
Is there a company in business today this advice doesn’t apply to?

By Quocirca

Published: Thursday 06 March 2003

Content management is about more than workflow or managing documents. But could it be vendors have simply been missing opportunities for years? Quocirca research director Clive Longbottom answers some of the questions...

The advent of electronic filing in the 1970s was meant to be the beginning of the end for the ubiquitous filing cabinet. Office automation systems through the 1980s and 1990s, such as PROFS, OfficeVision, All-in-1 and so on provided us with electronic folders where we could successfully file our important (and not so important) information for easy retrieval at a later date. When we found that sticking everything into a multitude of electronic folders didn't really help, we then had the likes of 'real' document management from the likes of Documentum and FileNET – fine for a couple of percent of the workforce who had legal obligations for the retrieval of information but a little on the high-cost side as solutions for everyone.

However, our propensity for creating more and more information carried on growing and we then started to hear about other kinds of document management from a raft of vendors – product data management (PDM – Axiom, Exertus), product lifecycle management (PLM – Dassault, EDS) engineering/enterprise/electronic data/document management (EDM – AIM, Entrada), source code management (SCM – Merant, Rational), web content management (WCM – NetQuest, Vignette), collaborative document management (CDM - iManage, Interwoven) – which seem to miss the whole point of the argument, while compounding the problem: the more silos of control we put in place, the smaller the chance of actually finding what we need to be able to make the correct, informed decision.

The knowledge management fervour of the 1990s driven by the likes of Autonomy, DCASoft and Lotus led us down a path of promised enlightenment, where we would be able to identify any requisite piece of information, anywhere, any time. The workflow vendors (FileNET, Staffware et al) all wanted to play their part. The portal vendors (Epicentric (now Vignette), Plumtree) saw their opportunities – and promptly squandered them.

So here we are. We still have paper and it is not going away (a paperless office is about as much of a likelihood as a paperless toilet, as they say). We have older-style methods of managing internal, legally required, paper audit trails. We have newer, first or second generation means of managing the flow of information from the inside of the organisation to the public and partner facing web presence. We may even have some form of an intranet sharing some pieces of information with us in a B2E type solution. But, we are still as blind as we were when we had to go to the typing pool and ask the head secretary if he or she knew what had happened to that very important letter that had been typed up a week ago last Wednesday.

Where have we gone wrong? A great deal of the problem has to be laid at the doors of the vendor community, who just did not realise that the management of one kind of data through a lifecycle should be the same as the management of any other kind of data.

But, we as users must also take our part of the blame. We have not identified what an actual informational lifecycle is or, when we have, we have made it so complex as to be virtually useless.

At Quocirca, we have a simple four stage model that helps to create a basis for an enterprise-wide means of document control and management (see figure).

In this model, a document starts life as a personal item. As an example, this article was started by me as a heading and a few bullet points within Microsoft Word. It could as easily be a CAD drawing within Catia, a multimedia extravaganza within Adobe Premier, or a marketing scenario dependent on data within Siebel. For the sake of this article, we will continue to call it a document.

At this stage, it has zero worth to anyone but me – and as such requires no version control or other document management tools, other than being able to be hidden from general access yet to be easily found by myself. After several iterations, I will be happy enough with the document to send it out to others in my organisation for their feedback – a peer review. Again, at this stage, the document is still not ready for the company as a whole to look at and is certainly not for public use.

My peers make a set of comments, recommendations (or scathing remarks), and I iterate the document until we can all agree that this is now an acceptable document. Within this space, we need collaborative tools – not document management – including discussion databases, whiteboarding, web, audio and video conferencing tools. Once agreed, the document now has a broader ownership, and needs to be moved into a more controlled environment for the next stage.

The document can now be published within the company, as a private document. The document has a degree of worth – which has to be decided by internal policies and procedures reflecting legal strictures on accessibility, retention and so on. At this stage, we need solid version controls, check-in/check-out features and the rest of the technologies associated with larger document management systems – but the larger part of the access by the majority of the users will be web-based (or could be dealt with by interactions between applications), and should not require expenditure on mass licences by the company involved.

We then come to the last stage which is the management of that information which is to make information available to the public. This raises different security concerns than for internal documents but should be able to be managed against the same database(s) that the internal system works against. Full version management enables information to be pulled off the public site rapidly but maintains an audit of what was there and when – an increasingly important requirement in today's litigious markets.

A key part of the whole of this mechanism is a suitable workflow engine, providing full audit capabilities and application integration. We still require legally compliant engines and information transformation and presentation engines. The overall solution remains complex but by using a simple business-driven framework, we have a much stronger chance of getting it right.

So, we now have a simple corporate approach to the problem of collaborative information management and control, which can be applied to any informational flow, whether it be a textual document, a production definition flow, a collection of web content, inter-application data flows or something else.

Do any vendors out there get this fully? Certainly, amongst others, the likes of Stellent, Merant and Interwoven are close to being there but pricing may remain an issue. The perception that having a large percentage of a very small market at €600+ per seat is better than having a smaller percentage of an extremely large market at €60- per seat still holds back a major market.

The most used document management systems in the world are Microsoft Explorer and Microsoft Outlook – and companies have found that they are worth every penny that they haven't paid for them. Ubiquitous information control and management is a necessity for companies but we will not pay through the nose for it. Until full solutions drop below €100 per seat and come from companies that we have a warm feeling about, we will just hanker back to wanting the 10 filing cabinets in the corner.

**Quocirca is a leading, user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the 'big picture'. For a full summary of its activities see www.quocirca.com, or reach the company's founding directors by emailing quocirca@silicon.com.

Also in this series: Through the fog... Automated speech recognition Through the fog... Public Key Infrastructure Through the fog... Vendor-channel relationships Through the fog... What future photo messaging?

For Quocirca's 'What's the fuss about...?' series for silicon.com, see this page

And for their earlier 'Surviving the Recession' series, see this page.