Successful enterprise content management (ECM) and collaboration involves more than selecting a vendor and installing new software. Organizations are now struggling under increasing volumes of varying types of content (multi-channel information overload). Thus, it is prudent to use a broad, content-centric framework to develop ECM and collaboration strategy.
Think about content in four types and their transactional technologies: business, persuasive, transactional and foundational content. By defining needs in terms of those four content types, enterprises should be able to develop strategies that will match their business needs with products that deal with those particular content issues.
1. Business Content: This is the content that is produced in the enterprise itself and is used to complete the daily tasks of users in the enterprise. It includes many of the common formats such as office documents, spreadsheets, web content and mobile content. It is at the base of many daily processes
2. Persuasive content: This is content that aims to influence external audience behavior. It can be created inside and outside the enterprise, or is even created by website visitors. While print has, until now, played a large role in this, this kind of content is increasingly digital and includes video, audio, rich Internet applications, blogs and wikis.
3. Transactional Content: This is the content that drives back-office processes and generally comes from outside the enterprise. It relies on workflow business process management software to drive it along, and comes in many formats including e-forms, faxes and electronic records.
4. Foundation Content: Foundation content technologies support all three types of content. These are technologies that provide functionality such as check-in/check-out technologies, permissions, archiving and workflows, as well as support for records and retention management. Most ECM products contain some level of foundational functionality, while other applications that are not content-based are starting to feature some of the foundational functionality, or integrate with ECMs that do.
Think about content in four types and their transactional technologies: business, persuasive, transactional and foundational content. By defining needs in terms of those four content types, enterprises should be able to develop strategies that will match their business needs with products that deal with those particular content issues.
1. Business Content: This is the content that is produced in the enterprise itself and is used to complete the daily tasks of users in the enterprise. It includes many of the common formats such as office documents, spreadsheets, web content and mobile content. It is at the base of many daily processes
2. Persuasive content: This is content that aims to influence external audience behavior. It can be created inside and outside the enterprise, or is even created by website visitors. While print has, until now, played a large role in this, this kind of content is increasingly digital and includes video, audio, rich Internet applications, blogs and wikis.
3. Transactional Content: This is the content that drives back-office processes and generally comes from outside the enterprise. It relies on workflow business process management software to drive it along, and comes in many formats including e-forms, faxes and electronic records.
4. Foundation Content: Foundation content technologies support all three types of content. These are technologies that provide functionality such as check-in/check-out technologies, permissions, archiving and workflows, as well as support for records and retention management. Most ECM products contain some level of foundational functionality, while other applications that are not content-based are starting to feature some of the foundational functionality, or integrate with ECMs that do.
According to a Forrester Research report titled Plan Your ECM Strategy for Business, Persuasive, Transactional, and Foundational Needs, companies developing an ECM strategy should consider how different content functionality supports specific business uses rather than focus on a single ECM vendor to take care of all their needs. They suggest taking a content centric approach rather than a tool centric approach to handle complexity.
Executive Summary
Enterprises continue to struggle under increasing volumes of varying types of content. Historically, content and collaboration (C&C) professionals have taken a product-specific approach to their enterprise content management (ECM) strategies: document management for office docs, web content management for online content, records management for corporate records, and so on. However, enterprises increasingly need to support multiple content types in different ways. They don't necessarily need a single ECM vendor that supports all content types. Instead, when developing a content strategy, they should consider persuasive, transactional, and foundational content functionality to support specific business use cases.
At Rose we use a broad, content-centric framework to develop ECM and collaboration strategy. Considerations include:
- Designing an enterprise-wide ECM and collaboration strategy that can scale up as an organization grows
- Best practices for developing strategies
- Key steps to make sure your ECM and collaboration plans add value
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