Successful Content Management Requires Strategy

Author: Douglas A. Acker

April 2008

These days successful deployment of Content Management (CM) is fraught with hyper-change, increased user sophistication, ubiquitous communication and interaction, regulatory pressure and financial constraint.  The explosive growth in people’s willingness to share content and collaborate, as demonstrated by the success of Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, Visible Path and other social networks, requires unprecedented degrees of responsiveness and adaptation in one’s content management strategy. This is why a comprehensive content strategy that anticipates and incorporates an approach specifically designed to meet such challenges is more important than ever.  

The Strategy
Defining an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy is a real challenge for many companies. Customarily, organizations tend to focus their attention on particular areas of pain, using CM applications to improve specific business processes.  These are commonly referred to as Point Solutions, and tend to address short-term concerns but inadvertently increase overall cost of ownership for all solutions. According to a new report by Datamonitor, an independent market analyst, four in five companies on average are deploying some form of basic content management strategy, choosing to spend what resources they have addressing specific content management challenges, such as records management, collaboration, web publishing, or document management.  While these solutions can be very valuable and successful, if they are not deployed within the context of a comprehensive strategy or roadmap, they are often myopic in their design and thereby too inflexible to respond to changes in business requirements.  Support and maintenance of these one-off solutions becomes more expensive than originally estimated to develop and maintain, and in some rare instances, obsolete before ever realizing their anticipated return on investment.

Change Management
To achieve lasting results requires not only selecting, designing and adapting CM technology to individual organizational needs, but also careful roadmap development and change management that brings technology into the business in a manner the workforce finds acceptable; motivating people to adapt to the necessary changes.  Too often, companies define their content management strategies based on short-sighted pain points instead of focusing on how the business and its people will continue to leverage content to achieve goals and objectives.  Understanding how content gets leveraged across the extended value-chain is paramount to successful content management, and requires diligent observation of business processes and workforce behaviors.

In a March 2008 survey conducted by AIIM, nearly 47% of respondents report that today's content management offerings require too much effort to implement, though half of respondents indicated that they wanted solutions built on top of an ECM platform.  Respondents also noted that integration of disparate technology components and integration with legacy systems accounted for the biggest delays in developing business solutions on top of ECM platforms - 37% and 34% respectively.  Organizations will continue to face significant challenges in realizing the full benefit of content management without first developing a comprehensive strategy that includes change management, governance and linkage to clearly defined business objectives.  Companies that have recognized the close relationship between content management and people, using technology to support them in achieving business objectives, have found content management highly effective in creating a lasting competitive advantage.  

End User Expectations
As valuable as the above goals are, the implementation continues to be a challenge to all organizations tackling content management.  As internal and external environments change, organizations must be remolded, and sometimes even reinvented, into something that better fulfills the needs and desires of the business.  Understanding the motivation and behavioral characteristics of user groups is critical to developing successful content management strategies. The next few years will represent the beginning of a significant change in how technology is used to empower the aspirations of users, and something every business leader, strategist, and advisor should commit to understanding.  It will not be new technology that drives competitive advantage, but rather new ways of deploying and combining established content management solutions to deliver on end-user expectations and requirements.  

Road Map
Practical steps should be taken to overcome these challenges, turning challenge into opportunity.  First, consider bringing in a third-party to assess the current environment.  Third parties bring an objective view, as well as benchmark experiences from similar engagements, which can provide a fresh perspective to what sometimes seem like insurmountable obstacles.  Second, exercise a consistent and real change management campaign from ideation through outcome measurement.  This will ensure committed adoption as opposed to enforced compliance from users, dramatically improving your chances of a successful implementation.  Lastly, take the time to define a practical and concise road map, and then stay the course.  It’s true that there are benefits in going through the process of generating a road map, but there are greater benefits in following through.