The content management worms are out of the can

If the phrase "content management" meant nothing to you before now, it`s a good time to commit it to memory. It`s everywhere, and it`s a solution to what the Butler Group calls the "most important infrastructure problem we face today": content chaos in organisations.

Let`s start at the beginning. What is content? To me, it`s all the information floating around organisations whose sole purpose is to communicate information to stakeholders. So, the SKU database that the point of sale system uses to do pricing is not content, but the piles and piles of documents generated by so-called "knowledge workers" is content.

Human beings have a singular talent for generating records of their comings and goings.

Jarred Cinman, Product Director, Cambrient

This is not a new problem. Human beings have a singular talent for generating records of their comings and goings. But painting on rocks or printing with a Gutenberg had one advantage over today`s technology: you couldn`t do it very fast. So content pretty much managed itself up until fairly recently.

The three big breaking points over the last 10 to 15 years were word processing, e-mail and the Web. These three media provided the mechanism to create, share and publish content so easily that it has literally exploded. Some staggering figures include:

• .         A University of Berkeley, California, study estimated in 2000 that about 7 million new documents are published on the Web every day. This has increased even further since then.
• .         The university also estimated that the world produces 1 to 2 exabytes (a billion gigabytes) of information each year - 250 megabytes for every single person on earth.
• .         AT Kearney estimated in 2001 that organisations worldwide spend up to $750 billion on wasted time spent seeking and duplicating information.

At the moment, content management is a term that has been applied mainly to Web sites and intranets. The need to manage professional content online, combined with the myriad other management tasks that come with running a Web site, has meant that there has been a boom in content management systems for Web sites.

Documents have been attacked by various document management systems, but organisations have struggled to bed these down. Perhaps the most serious limitation with documents is that they are large blobs of unintelligible data. Although they may be stored or workflowed, the contents remain unstructured and impenetrable.

E-mail has just about been all but ignored. Who can imagine trying to make sense of that mountain of garbage? Nevertheless, some of that garbage is actually valuable corporate information, or should be. A good example is e-mail from customers making sales enquiries, service requests and complaints. Knowing more about that could be critical to revenue and improved service. For many organisations, this information goes into individual`s inboxes and is eventually lost forever.

The promise of true enterprise content management (ECM, as if we need another acronym in our lives) is to provide an organisation-wide framework for managing important corporate content. That includes documents, relevant e-mails, Web sites, intranets and rich media (images, video, audio, etc).

Central to ECM is establishing a "content repository" within the organisation that either physically stores or else at least knows about the location of all organisational content. This repository then becomes involved in all content-related activities, meaning that all content created needs to be stored with or registered with the content repository.

That`s only half the work though. The other half is the structure of the content. What Web pages, documents and e-mails all have in common is that they are either unstructured or structured in a proprietary way. To see this, you only need compare a few documents from the same company. They might have the same basic document template, but otherwise it`s up to each author to decide on his/her section names, document layout, whether to include references or indexes and so forth.

Web pages or intranet pages are even worse. With the full scope of functionality provided by HTML to control colours, images, text, not to mention all kinds of fancy Dynamic HTML or Flash files, the variety of structure from page to page can be dramatic.

So the content management work begins with deciding how you want your organisational content to be structured. For each main area of content - a simple example is a press release - what will the standard structure be? Heading, author, summary, body copy, maximum of two image attachments is a possible structure. If you can get all your press releases to obey this structure, and they can be stored centrally, you have a growing body of searchable, re-usable content assets.

This is as big a job as it sounds. It involves going methodically through each area of your business and restructuring existing information, as well as putting in place processes to ensure that new information is created right, and stored in the content repository in a place it can be easily found again.

The good news is that it can be an incremental process. Think of it this way: just fixing the process around one piece of content in your organisation, be it a Web page or a document, frees up hours in the day that would have been spent on duplication.

That`s the real power of solving the content management problem. It strikes at the heart of time wastage, and provides direct benefit to each person affected.

And the right software will help. Selecting a good content management system is the subject of another whole Industry Insight, but it needn`t cost the earth. In my view, selecting a multimillion-rand US-based product has proven to be a trying process for most local companies that have tried it.

They are so feature-heavy and poorly supported here, that they are increasingly not an option. Local products, custom development and lower-cost international solutions are starting to look like the attractive choices for local companies.

So, is "content management" a must-have? Here are the top three reasons why I think it is:

• .         You need to get your Web site and intranet under control and up-to-date. The solution to this is going to be a content management system of one kind. It`s a good time then to assess content within your whole organisation.
• .         You are wasting money every day on a problem that can be solved now. And you don`t need to solve it all at once. Each step forward counts in real rand and cent savings.
• .         The problem is only getting worse, and it will never stop, not ever.