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Managing Content Chaos

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The world has come a long way since the introduction of electronic document

management systems (EDMS) software products in 1980s, which aimed at solving

problems arising out of complexities related to workflow, imaging, and document

management. Various application areas that included ECM are Document Management,

Web Content Management, Document Imaging, Records Management, Digital Asset

Management, Media Asset Management, Collaboration and Computer Output to Laser

Disk, etc. There are strong indications of rapid adoption of Records Management,

Digital Asset management, and Web Content Management.

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Software companies came up with solutions for each of these segments. The

idea behind all these software applications was to save time and improve

productivity. But, the key issue at that time was that these applications

addressed only specific needs of specific departments and was not having a

capability to help the entire organization in managing its content. This

resulted in solution providers coming up with Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

meant to be a panacea for all the content related needs of enterprises. These

increased activities are visible in the Gartner study on ECM, which puts growth

of market at 12% per year through 2010 to grow to $4.2 bn in 2010.

The Need for ECM



Unstructured content spread across enterprises creates multiple problems,

impacting businesses. The sheer volume of data that is increasing day by day is

making enterprises think about the ways to manage them in order to stay ahead of

the competition. The need to make information available at a time when it is

required has gained crucial importance. According to Kaushik Bagchi, country

manager, IM, SWG, IBM India/SA, To stay competitive, companies must respond to

a dynamic, competitive business environment by making business process changes

inside their organizations as conditions change outside. These processes are

often dependent upon one or many forms of content, which must also be leveraged

and properly managed for compliance.

Diwakar Nigam, managing director of Newgen Software, expresses similar views:

Managing compliance and ensuring control over contents while removing

redundancies and ensuring completeness of content are some of the key challenges

before enterprises.

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The problem of increasing content has been compounded by equally increasing

number of users accessing the content. It poses additional challenges for the IT

department. According to Kaushik Bagchi of IBM SWG, IT departments face an

ever-growing need to open doors for more users to easily and quickly access the

content they need, while providing retention and records management, content

security and protection.

Key Trends



The ECM market has witnessed maturing of solution portfolio. The type of

data that is stored and accessed by enterprises has also undergone a tremendous

change. According to Bagchi, The ECM market has been transformed over the past

10 yearsfrom a collection of static repositories housing large volumes of

images, forms, and other unstructured data, to a strategic asset that enables

customers to reap the benefits of critical business efforts, such as SOA, and

business process management and compliance. Content is no more standalone

without any relationship with overall businesses. It is, according to Bagchi,

becoming more integrated with business processes including loan origination,

claims processing (insurance and healthcare), underwriting, policies and

contracts, new drug development, case management, and customer service.

India is still a new market for ECM kind of solution. According to Nigam,

Worldwide, large organizations have implemented ECM for efficient working or

reducing paper-based processing and building knowledge bases. India still lags

behind this mindset unfortunately. At the moment, though compliance is being

talked about in the country, real implementation is happening only in few

cases. There appears to be a move by enterprises toward having a single

platform. This is strongly suggested by Sridharan Sankaran, director, Content

Management and Archiving India Center of Excellence, EMC. We are also seeing

companies gradually moving toward a completely unified architecture and

representing a significant innovation over todays more loosely integrated

platforms. Solutions in the market now help customers graduate from traditional

content services that address creation, management, delivery, and archival of

content. IBMs Bagchi shares similar viewpoint, saying, Customers are making

platform standardization decisions for ECM and are buying solutions that help

build their core enterprise infrastructures.

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Eying big opportunities, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and EMC got into this

business. IBM acquired the leading ECM player FileNet to further strengthen its

content management capability of Websphere Information Integrator. It may be

recalled that, prior to FileNet, IBM had acquired Ascential in 2005 to gain data

integration expertise.

Though compliance

is being talked about in India, real implementation is happening only in a

few cases



Diwakar Nigam, managing director, Newgen Software
Investment in an

ECM solution is more strategic than before; it is more than just document

management



Rafiq Somani, country manager, PTC-India
To stay

competitive, companies must respond to a dynamic, competitive business

environment



Kaushik Bagchi, country manager, IM, SWG, IBM India/SA
Companies are

moving toward a unified architecture from todays more loosely integrated

platforms



Sridharan Sankaran, director, Content Management and Archiving India Center
of Excellence, EMC

Open Source and ECM



Apart from the products and solutions that are available from traditional

ECM vendors, some vendors like Alfresco, eXo, InfoGrid, Jahia, Knowledge Tree,

Magnolia, and Nuxeo have come up with solutions based on Open Source. They are

providing more choices to enterprises that are looking for a complete solution

to manage their content. These vendors claim to offer more ECM features and

functionality as they are based on contributions from the open source community,

besides offering lower ownership cost.

On the enterprise spending on the ECM solution, Rafiq Somani, country

manager, PTC-India, says, Investment in an ECM solution is more strategic than

before, as ECM is more than just document management. There is a clear shift of

focus from one-size-fits-all to providing solutions that are focused on

line-of-businesses and vertical-market ECM solutions that address customers

increasingly complex process as well as compliance adherence.

Sudesh Prasad



sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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