Special Supplement to May 2001

Andy Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Overture Article: Content, the Once and Future KingWhether its the documents we write or the e-mails we send or even the videos wecreate, the raw material that powers e-business is content. Always has been. Todayssmart business managers have figured out the power in content, and its potential tocreate action. We asked the industry-leading sponsors of this white paper to share their high-altitude views of this exciting, developing space

Mike Zimmer, IBM Corporation . . . . . 4 Enterprise Content Management is a Key Success Factor for an e-Business Infrastructure

The growth of e-business is driving organizations to manage and distribute digitalcontent, including images, computer-generated output, business documents, rich mediaand more...

Martyn Christian, FileNET . . . . . . . . 6 Using Content Management to Realize a Competitive AdvantagePundits claim that the Web levels the playing field for many businesses today. And yet,few have been able to field a truly winning proposition online...

Randy Frid and Randall Eckel, InfoImage . . . . . . . . 8 Streamlining the Decision Cycle Through Collaborative

Decision ManagementOver the last 20 years, management philosophy has shifted from command and control to a more distributed and enabled management philosophy...

Compaq Computer Corporation. . . . . 9 The Enterprise Information Portal and eBusinessThe rapid advance of the Internet, groupware, relational databases and search enginesallows knowledge workers to come together and share ideas and information asnever before...

Scott Warner, AccuSoft . . . . . . . . . . 10 Maximizing Corporate Bandwidth Utilization and User Satisfaction ...at the Same Time!

We are drowning in a sea of information. The challenge is to learn to swim in that sea,rather than drown in it

Mitchell Gross, Mobius. . . . . . . . . . . 11 Bridging the Back-Office/Front-Office GapWith 75% of your organizations information contained in unstructured formats, canyou transform it into usable content? The problem that e-business exposes most oftenis inadequate integration...

Nick Denton, Moreover . . . . . . . . . . 12 The Rise of Web IntelligenceWe live in a market of instant information, where perception and image are increasinglylinked to stock prices and the best strategic plans can be undermined in the course of a morning...

Benjamin B. Sargent, Lionbridge . . . . 13 Multilingual Knowledge Management Empowers Global eBusinessWith the penetration of Internet technologies into global business operations, employeesat every level are collaborating across multiple geographies...

Karen Strong, Clarity . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Enterprise ProfilingDocuments play a vital role in Enterprise Content Management. Unlike other contentsources, document creation and capture can occur at every desktop, in every process,and by every on-line application...

Bisher Abaza, eManage . . . . . . . . . . 15 Managing Email ContentChallenges and BenefitsAs more organizations embrace e-mail as their primary method of communication,most overlook the fact that e-mail contains evidence of business decisions, actions and transactions...

Best Practices in Enterprise Content Management

Sponsored by

The E-business evolutionContent may be the once and future

king, but it hasnt always been recognizedas such. Just as row-and-column databasesystems defined the nature of businessautomation in the 70s and 80s, it can besaid that the automation of the creation,storage and delivery of a more random(call it heterogeneous, if you must) mix of

data types has only penetrated business-asset management activities over the pastdecade or less.

Early in the evolution of e-business,the idea of integrated information sourceswas foreign, explains Teresa Whittle,Worldwide Segment Executive for ContentManagement, IBM. The realization thatthere are these incredible informationsources, mostly in non-traditional forms,at our disposal if we could just get at them... that realization really changed the roleof content.

Whittle continues, You can draw acomplete parallel analogy to database sys-tems. At first we had desktop file systemsscattered all over. And this person couldntuse my file, and I couldnt get to anotherpersons data. We solved that problem withuniversally accessible, centralized systems.I see the exact same thing happening now

with all our other digital assets, and viewcontent management as an extension ofdatabase management.

Whittle goes on to list the thingsweve learned from the history of data-base management: One, islands of datashould be avoided; two, the need to sup-port multiple platforms and multipleoperating systems when were planninginfrastructure; and three, making thosevarious platforms and file types seamlessto the web interface is key.

Sounds familiar. But however muchdj vu one may sense in this latest evolu-tionary stage, there is something that setscontent management apart from previousinformation management initiatives: Content,the king, serves many masters.

An example is zero latency, a termfamiliar to hardware geeks as a measure-ment related to computer hard drives butre-defined by Compaq as a term of enter-prise efficiency. Instant access to all of anenterprises many sources of business intel-ligence allows it to respond proactively toany stimuli sensed from any of the enter-prises points of awareness. Call it appliedbusiness intelligence.

Take customer relationship manage-ment (CRM) as an example, explains

Adrian Kasbergen, Director, Messaging& Collaborative Solutions, Enterprise &Mid-Market Solutions, Compaq ComputerCorporation. In the traditional sense, itjust means having the ability to get tocustomer information and use it to yourbenefit. But why stop there? What if youcould direct the decision-making andaction-taking process based on a changeor reversal in the expected course of acustomer relationship? The simple exam-ple is a customer who suddenly stops ordrastically reduces ordering the usualamount of product. This informationshould be, first, identified as importantand then delivered to the sales force,says Kasbergen. CRM is then no longera single-employee-to-single-customerapplication.

Nope. Its much more significant; its acomplete business solution that is self-aware,

Special Supplement to

Content, the Once and Future KingEnterprise Content Management emerges as the key factor in employee empowerment

In his opening comments at a Web-market-ing conference last year, Jesse Kornblutheditorial director for America Online andthus arguably the most-read content guy inthe wired worldleaned into the micro-phone and said quietly: I propose that wefind whoever coined the term content andkick the living **** out of them.

Funny line. The 500-or-so Web exec-types in the room roared with laughter,and approval.

But Im not sure why. There are lots oftrite business terms that are far more regu-larly abused and misunderstood (if youdont believe me, take the term knowl-edge out for a spin sometime).

Its relatively easy: Content is the digi-tal stuff we use everyday in our work livesto sell and service, help and maintain ourcustomers, our partners and ourselves.Content is the evidence of what we do.Carl Sagan said about life on Earth, Weare star-stuff. In our business lives, we arecontent-stuff.

So it stands to reason that contentthe documents, messages, collaborationsand resultsshould emerge at the topof managements to-do list. Because, asDavid Weinberger likes to point out, thatswhat we do: We Manage Things. If itmoves, manage it is the bumper stickerfor the age.

But just exactly how should we man-age our most precious items of corporateproperty. And more importantly ... justexactly why?

Sure, the Web has been a great cata-lyst, but I dont think it has fundamentallychanged the nature of the beast, insistsMartyn Christian, Senior Vice President,Applications and Corporate Marketing forFileNET Corporation. Whether contentcomes over the Web or the U.S. mail isirrelevant; content IS the feeder mecha-nism for all business processes. Andalways has been.

May 2001S2

"The realization that there are incredible

information sources at our disposal if we

could just get at them...that realization

really changed the role of content."

Teresa Whittle, IBM

By Andy Moore

Special Supplement to May 2001 S3

that directs decision-making and forcesaction. Something database-, document-,image-, bla bla- management never wasand could never be. And there, my friends,is the difference.

(Theres actually another huge differ-ence between content as we now under-stand it and good ole fashioned data: NewWeb authoring and metadata technologiesallow content to be created in such a waythat it can be pre-disposed to cross-depart-mental use. It can be made for versatilitywith planning aforethought, not as an after-the-fact kludge. With that kind of long-viewapplied to the creation, capture and mainte-nance of enterprise content, the future forits application is exciting indeed.)

Employees and Empowerment

Allow your minds to continue expand-ing for a moment, while we talk a littleabout decision-making. I say you couldmake the exactly correct decision everytime, every day, provided you had ... what?The correct information? Yep. The experi-ence of smart people to advise you? Uh-huh.And all the time in the world to think aboutit? Bingo.

But you dont.Every day, employees are tasked with

making decisions, little and big. Do I callthis customer? Should I offer this discount?Etc., etc., Randall Eckel, President andCEO of InfoImage explains. At the sametime, managers have been trying to pushdecision-making down to