Content Management

 
Over the past 20 years most organisations have implemented ERP systems to manage their resources. These systems have been fundamental to the dramatic improvements in efficiency and quality generally experienced.
 
As the economy (especially in the UK) moves away from standardised mass manufacturing towards a predominantly knowledge-based economy, the IT challenge now most predominant for many organisations is how to manage valuable enterprise knowledge, critical to their survival and success.
 
Some industries, such as solicitors, insurance brokers, healthcare, etc have always been knowledge-intensive and these have typically been notorious for making poor use of business IT systems. The main reason being is that it is very difficult to structure such complex knowledge, to fit the highly structured hierarchical rigid taxonomies inherent with ERP in general.
 
Typically within an ERP system, data is stored securely and categorised logically and consistently across the whole organisation. This means that knowledge stored within the ERP system is quite easy to reliably extract using modern Business Intelligence (BI) applications.
 
Increasingly though, more and more business critical information is stored in a random ad-hoc and insecure fashion, for example, unstructured in documents, proposals, contracts, charts, drawings, spreadsheets, e-mails, Instant Message (IM) etc. So more and more businesses now face the challenge of how do they manage the valuable knowledge in this form?
 
Content Management systems enable organisations to make sense of this unstructured information. They also add other benefits, such as increased security, reliability, consistency, more effective collaboration and business process automation.

Elements included within Content Management:

  • Document Management
  • Archiving
  • Enterprise Search
  • Workflow
  • Web Content Management
  • Taxonomy and Metadata
  • Collaboration
  • Enterprise Search
  • Compliance
  • Reporting
 
So Content Management is a broad topic touching virtually all parts of an organisation. There may be overlap, with more focused systems, such as CRM which could be described as knowledge management, workflow and collaboration, but focused upon improving a customer's experience whenever it interacts with the organisation. Also effective Project Management requires many of the above elements.

The benefits of using Content Management

  • Reduce compliance costs dramatically
  • Increase compliance from <50% to >95%
  • Reduce risk significantly
  • Automate complex business processes
  • Find information in unstructured data
  • Preserve valuable company knowledge
  • Share valuable company knowledge
  • Collaborate more effectively
  • Knit disparate systems together