Enterprise Content Management Overview

February 26th, 2007 |
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Understand why enterprise content management is gaining visibility in today’s market and how companies are developing their ECM strategies. Learn more about how content management is utilized across multiple industries and customer examples for critical content-centric businesses processes. Additionally, we discuss next steps for initiating a successful content management strategy – starting with an enterprise-class ECM platform.

This is an EMC podcast.

Transcript:

Host: Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Guest: Bryan House – EMC Software

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Hello, my name is Lance Shaw and you are listening to the enterprise content management podcast series from EMC, when content matters. Today, we will be joined on the phone by Bryan House.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Hey, Lance thanks for having me.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Hey, glad you could be here. Bryan is the group Marketing Manager on our Strategic Marketing initiatives team. He manages our enterprise content management campaign. So, let’s get started, Bryan, tell us for starters why is content management growing in importance to organizations today?

Bryan House – EMC Software

Sure, Lance, it is interesting because even though a lot of the technologies that make up enterprise content management, things like document management imaging or even ‘Computer Output to Laser Disc’ (COLD) are typically considered a group of established technologies. At the same time, however the market for enterprise content management is really only recently emerged and is changing pretty rapidly, next I think there is really a number of reasons for this.

One is really the growth of unstructured information. It is really exploding within the enterprises, and analysts estimate that the amount of unstructured information within companies is growing anywhere from 60% to 200% every single year depending on the vertical market. You combine that with the average storage cost, really plummeting and almost approaching zero, and we are creating more information than has ever existed. You ever see California Berkley did a study a few years ago that said that we are creating the equivalent of 500,000 new libraries of congruence every single year. It’s to give you some idea the scope of growth of digital information.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Right, right, so you give me any ideas on sort of why all these growth in information is occurring today?

Bryan House – EMC Software

Well, I think a part of this can be attributed to human behavior. I mean so to think about your sort of day-to-day routine as a knowledge worker in an organization. So, I mean every one of us myself included we create megabytes of data, and you might hear someone say, I (ph) create gigabytes of data every day but very few of us, if any of us delete much or any information on a daily basis. So, what this means is we are creating more and more information and storing it because storage is cheap within organizations. That’s information that it is in applications that listen databases or sits in our outlook and our personal folders and our C drives.

So, organizations are really looking for central visibility and control of this information both on the structure data and unstructured information size. IDC and to give you an idea that the problems that organizations are grappling with, said that enterprises on average have 24 repositories with large companies having as many as a hundred of repositories creating a whole wealth of information silos and so you know the growth and emergence of enterprise content management is really to address that problem as information is scattered everywhere within an organization.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Right, right so you said something a minute ago that maybe need some clarification, you mentioned unstructured content and structured data. There are some big differences there. How are those two types of information different.

Bryan House – EMC Software

That’s great, that’s a great question Lance. When you think about structured data, we would like to describe that as the information that resides neatly in a relational database. It could be organized by rows and columns and really sort of is the driver behind transactional applications ERP, CRM, accounting applications within an organization. Unstructured content or unstructured information it ends up being all the rest of the digital information that exists in an organization from emails and office files to print stream reports from an SAP systems, scanned images of invoices and what not and when organizations try to value how much of one or the other do I have, what we found is that some 20% of the information in an organization is structured. That which means 80% of the information is unstructured in just sort of very loosely organized and managed.

In fact, some of the analysts say that some 90% of that unstructured information in unmanaged and that creates big problems for an organization because unstructured information touches every seat in the enterprise but it is really the most difficult to manage within an organization.

So, whereas over the last 10 or 15 years you have seen companies spend a lot of money to get their structured data under control and under management. Now, they are starting to shift their view to unstructured information either for purposes of compliance driven by things like Sarbanes-Oxley and litigation to get things under control or for process now its management purposes to make their businesses run more effectively and understand what information they have it within their organization.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Right, that all makes a lot of sense. So, let me ask you another question for those listening today. Where should companies begin when they are considering enterprise content management or as we like to call it ECM. I mean how do organizations really start to think strategically about ECM?

Bryan House – EMC Software

Sure, you know the critical first step in developing an ECM strategy and this is certainly what we have seen in our customer base is to identify the processes where content matters most to the organization and these are the processes or content is a critical input or output of a process and often times becomes a bottle neck in the efficient process that needs to be addressed. For a Life Sciences companies these areas include new drug applications and electronic lab, notebooks and the RND groups and this is an area where document have 15 years ago really first established itself in the new drug application for the FDA submissions as Geoffrey Moore made famous in his “Crossing the Chasm” book, and that’s a great example for high pain and high opportunity for return on investment.

For manufacturing companies we often see more customers, users, for new product development or engineering change management processes particularly where unstructured information like engineering drawings is linked to things like building materials lists or material specification that are managed in an SAP, ERP system. So, we are making this information more valuable and more accessible to the users but also putting it under control to keep that process moving forward.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Alright, excellent so you talk about Life Sciences manufacturing examples and I know there are many other examples of ECM in use today. What are some of the common requirements across these applications?

Bryan House – EMC Software

Sure, for any organization considering an ECM strategy. First step, is really is looking once you have identified those critical business processes as look for an enterprise class platform that can really address and help grow whichever requirements are supposed to address the initial process that you have identified as well as can kind of grow with you as your business evolves and changes. So, the first key piece of that is you just need a platform that can support a complete range of content types that could be expanded over a time to include new information types. We see this today, this podcast is a great example. Who would have thought two or three years ago that podcast will become an information type in audio files within an organization. Now, it is a critical piece, blogs are another example of that.

So a platform that’s going to grow and handle all those information as you think about this vast array of unstructured content within your organization. The second area is process support, the ability to support a wide range of users and business processes from a platform perspective. You can handle the high volume transactional processes associated with invoice applications or accounts payable but as well as support much more dynamic and hard collaborate of processes between teams or across the firewall that need to deliver you information and may come decisions, come to some decision around that information. So, in having that process support really helps you future proof your business in terms of managing that unstructured content.

Then, the last piece of this is an extensible platform that can support growth that can be integrated with your enterprise apps, so whether it is a ERP or accounting or account payable systems that can manage the unstructured information associated with those systems as well as connecting to the authoring environments that your end users live in whether there will be design, applications like Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office or Outlook and things like that.

So, that really but thinking about content types process and extensibility you can really create address a wide range of content applications and sort of think both short term for immediate benefits and return on investments as well as a long term strategy in terms of what is my content management platform.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Okay, alright those are excellent points. So, I was thinking about that maybe would be now really helpful to sort of give us some examples, some customer examples of these and how people are using ECM today.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Great, I am happy that you asked, so, and a couple I had thought I had touch on today. The first is Wolters Kluwer. Now there are a very interesting example in the publishing field because what they have done is identified a mission critical content centric business application that’s really the core of their business, their publishing process. So, Wolters Kluwer a medical publishing company, they have 12 locations on four continents and they produce a pretty wide range of information there. They have some 200 medial journals and they have as many as 350 books that they publish. But what is really interesting there is the complexity of all over that. Some of their books have as many as 400 editions, per titles because there is lots of local language translation and sort of follow on editions for text books and things.

I mean, managing complexity associated with that is just tremendous and so prior to implementing a documental system, I mean this process was very manual and really lack of visibility into the flow of content to their publishing process. And the result was they really couldn’t identify issues until a problem sort of came up, couldn’t sort of be proactive in the identification. So, they didn’t realize that manuscript was ready for production till the production line was ready to go and the manuscript wasn’t there, of there were issues in lay out. They weren’t able to find these until sort of that problem became a big problem and then they had to do fire drills.

So, what they were really hoping to address with this global multi-channel publishing process, they built called Pub Fusion was clearly the speed time to market and reduce cost associated with that process. But, then there was sort of key piece, so they needed the ability to deliver content across multiple consumption outlets. The publishing business is changing, so they need to publish to print, Web, PDA, and other outlets simultaneously and they needed an engine that could support that.

So, they show the MC document how to do this and this helped them create a more proactive approach to their publishing process. So, they can identify and address process bottom next earlier, identify problems before they emerge and became significant in sort of fire drills. They were to communicate changes earlier to their customer in their process, its editors and authors in most cases and eliminate their potential revenue losses by meeting the guidelines and commitments they made around advertising and another areas on time and with the content that they said they would. So, it is pub-fusion today. They have some 270s, they are actually producing content with another 500 people touching the system and then involved in the pub-fusion process and where they have really seen the big process efficiencies is that they were able to reduce a 180 work flows that they had in their existing process, down to three standard paper list, work flow processes.

So, their visibility increased dramatically and they were able to get some of the benefits of standardization which helped them really reduce costs and reduce cycle time, they estimate they reduce cycle time by 10% and saved upwards of $800,000 in just nine months last year. So, really it is pretty dramatic benefits there. They have also seen some revenue growth in specific areas, pretty significant revenue growth. So, it has both been a top line as well as the bottom line impact at Wolters Kluwer.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Excellent, that’s a great example to me, everybody who is listening today, I am sure is interested in ways to speed time to market and reducing the number of workloads, reducing cycle times and these are all sort of a great example of something that people will all like to be able to introduce into their organization I am sure.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Yeah, exactly, those are common whether you are publishing or whether you are in just about any other industry. The other example, I wanted to touch based on is a company Dow Corning. It was sort of the other end of the spectrum from content management in the sense that they had, they are well beyond sort of identifying that first content management application in a heavy priority on, a immediate return on investment and measurable success. They are now sort of a much more at the enterprise standard for content management.

So, at Dow Corning, they are global manufacturer of silicon-based products and they develop market manufacture over 7,000 products and services around the globe, and they are interesting because they are joint venture and equally owned by the Dow Chemical Company and Corning Incorporated, so a lot of collaborative processes in terms of leveraging the RND that comes out of those and bringing that to market. But, their company that’s been leveraging document for a number of years, now they have multiple content repositories, corporate wide and they are serving more than a 150 content management applications around their organization.

So, examples include Web publishing, application for the global Websites to ensure brand consistency while allowing local and regional experts and business people to contribute content via templates. They do a great deal of collaboration across what across functional teams both inside the enterprise, things like Six Sigma and marketing and product launches as well as the external groups and RND and academia in related industry areas. In their plan operations they have managed a lot of plan safety procedures with document and they have an interesting, very interesting integration with SAP where they shift raw data from an SAP application, then assemble it dynamically and the materials safety data sheets and those data sheets are retrieved from the document repository or their first responder, emergency response Website.

So, a type of critical data that’s related to the operations in safety in their plans being pulled right from document and with all that sort of fail over and provisioning that sort of to ensure that that application is always available. But, if sort of a big picture Dow, Dow Corning they have seen measurable results and most importantly leverage by adapting EMC document and as their corporate standard for content management. So, they are able to deliver improved consistency across key business applications as well as achieve the economies of scale in a compliance secure manner by really going after that 80% of the information that exist at Dow Corning that’s unstructured in providing a framework to really address big pieces of that.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Right, now that’s a great example of a company organization that’s really taken content management and applied it to a lot of different business processes, right. That is sort of a great example what you talked about earlier but you may be starting to trying or trying to solve one particular business problems but you want to really lock yourself into a platform that’s going to allow you to service a lot of other issues down the road and other business processes that you maybe haven’t even before seen yet.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Yeah, absolutely and really grow with your business, as your business grows and changes.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Yeah, exactly so as we wrap up today’s podcast, I am wondering if you can maybe just give us sort of your top threes critical take away from all this that to lead people with today.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Sure, you know the first part that we always recommend to any of our customers is to start with critical business processes that are content centric, where content is a critical output or objective for that process. The reason for this is these kinds of processes represent the greatest opportunities for return on investment. They can move the needle within the organization to ensure that endusers will adopt and take advantages of system because it helps them with their day-to-day work processes as well as helps show the benefit of content management as your organization sort of thinks about commitment and growth within that system. The second is to look for ways to extend that initial investment once you have made that into adjacent applications.

As with any technology platform, you want to create opportunities for leverage to take advantage of the infrastructure you have invested in and sort of make that and help that to grow within your organization. So adjacent applications is a great way to sort of think and to grow that from that initial investment. And then lastly is just to determine how content management applications and platforms can grow with your business and your business’s changing requirements. When evaluating content management systems you want to assistance that can manage any type of content and process and that exists, integrates seamlessly into your existing infrastructure.

So, it doesn’t require great changes on the infrastructure and you can really focus on in delivering return on investment and helping endusers do their day-to-day work more effectively and successfully by taking advantage of that content management system.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

Alright, well those are three great take aways and I appreciate it, and Bryan certainly thank you very much for calling in today and joining us on this podcast

Bryan House – EMC Software

Thanks Lance.

Lance Shaw – EMC Software

For those of you, who are listening in today, thank you for joining us and it will certainly encourage you to find more information on enterprise content management systems and as part of your evaluation process, feel free to visit our Website and take a look at what is enterprise content management section. It includes a number of items including a 15 minute sort of evaluation guide for enterprise content management as well as reports from the leading analysts firms on the market and EMC’s leadership position in that market. This content is all available on software.emc.com, thank you for listening, and have a great day.

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