This document was revised on 29 June 2009. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

This Case Study details how Pfizer standardized on a basic content services (BCS) offering for work in progress along with a robust enterprise content management (ECM) platform that addresses FDA-mandated content applications. CIOs, business and IT leaders, and application manager executives should read this study to see how Pfizer dealt with governance issues, migration from legacy systems and the costs of maintaining two solutions.

• Pfizer had multiple content management systems in place resulting in costly maintenance fees, strains on support and development resources, and siloed content. By standardizing on two platforms for clearly delineated tasks, it can eliminate servers and support for the legacy systems.
• Success factors included having a solid business case, implementing a strong governance policy, leveraging third-party solutions where necessary, and a establishing a methodology for recouping costs.
• Pfizer adopted a self-service model for new site provisioning that is enabled through a custom-created Site Wizard.

• Consider the coexistence of a collaborative document management platform and a more process-centric system to balance user needs and different content applications. Identify deployment scenarios and establish clear usage guidelines, so users understand when to use which tool.
• Build a solid business case for your SharePoint investments and for retiring legacy systems by focusing on opportunities for hard dollar savings, such as eliminating servers, not renewing maintenance fees and reducing the number of support resources applied to legacy applications.
• As you begin to standardize on a shortlist of vendors in ECM and embark on a strategy to retire legacy systems, adopt a holistic approach to moving content into the newer systems. Along with migrating metadata and content objects, this approach should consider human issues such as going through a content valuation exercise to prune content volume.

Pfizer, a global pharmaceutical company, adopted a two-prong strategy to solve its content management requirements. Pfizer's two-pronged approach is a prime example of how many Gartner clients are addressing the varying content types they must manage and providing users with appropriate tools for the tasks. It highlights the importance of good governance, building a solid business case and rationale, and leveraging third-party solutions to extend its Microsoft SharePoint implementation.

Like many large global companies, Pfizer had multiple content management systems deployed, resulting in costly maintenance fees, strains on support and development resources, and siloed content. Yet, Pfizer recognized it had a range of user needs and that one solution would not meet all. It ultimately standardized on two: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), a basic content services offering for collaborative content and EMC Documentum, a process-centric solution for its business essential documents.

Being a pharmaceutical company, Pfizer had to accommodate highly regulated documents and records, but it also needed a way to support the more ad hoc and collaborative processes. For managing and storing its controlled documents and those associated with new drug submissions to the FDA, Pfizer had implemented EMC Documentum. Over the years, it has invested heavily in Documentum, resulting in a large collection of software and servers with associated customizations, and IT resources. For its more casual document and content management needs, however, Pfizer had a variety of legacy systems. Having this plethora of content repositories and applications resulted in costly maintenance fees, strains on support and development resources, and siloed content. Pfizer is not unusual in this regard. In a 2008 Gartner survey of nearly 400 respondents (see Note 1), 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories.

Pfizer set about to consolidate its legacy content management systems. The firm chose to keep Documentum as the enterprise standard for business essential documents. EMC's Centera is used as the storage media for long-term archive of inactive documents and records. For collaborative content, Pfizer chose to build an enterprise collaboration platform on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. This is in keeping with Gartner's advice to IT leaders, architects and planners that they consider SharePoint as a tactical basic content service providing a place to store, find and deliver documents and other content associated with project-related activities or work-in-progress content. When content is deemed final and needs to be kept long-term, it should be moved into an ECM system.

Known formally within Pfizer as Enterprise Collaboration Framework (ECF), the SharePoint implementation is a collaborative, non-validated environment that handles business operational content as well as work in process documents. It is the global standard replacing the multitude of legacy systems for non-regulated content, especially eRoom and Livelink. Pfizer already migrated its static Web pages off of Plumtree into MOSS and has begun migrating other content. It anticipates moving fully to MOSS and Documentum by 2010. It will eventually be used to support the Web content capabilities now delivered via Documentum. ECF went live in September 2007, after a six-month early adopter phase. Part of the success of its coexistence strategy was due to communication and setting expectations. The Pfizer Technology Engineering team communicated to the users that Documentum focuses on facilitating the life cycle of a document, while SharePoint's focus is on facilitating the life cycle of a team.

Pfizer's ECF (MOSS) is used for a variety of collaborative and ad hoc content management activities. These include managing weekly meetings, building a knowledge base with wikis, maintaining custom contact information about team members, publishing information via a blog, task routing, creating slide show presentations, and soliciting feedback with discussion boards. Pfizer implemented a library of prebuilt site templates to enable faster site creation. ECF is becoming as pervasive as e-mail within Pfizer.

EMC Documentum and ECF coexist at Pfizer and are well integrated. Pfizer worked with EMC to develop the integration between Documentum and SharePoint. Content can be promoted from SharePoint into Documentum and from SharePoint. Pfizer originally selected FAST (now owned by Microsoft) as the search engine to support searches against both systems. According to Program Manager, David Biersach, Pfizer's goal is to leverage the best of both tools and provide a smooth interoperability experience for end users.

Pfizer now has more than 41,000 active SharePoint users with 1,000 top-level, cross business unit sites and 7,000 total active team sites. It also supports secure external collaboration sites accessible to authorized non-Pfizer employees. SharePoint is installed in four data centers and supports 11 Pfizer divisions and 122 departments. By design, approximately 42% of team sites are open to all Pfizer employees, rather than just a select group, and over 25% of the current team sites have members that span departments and geographic locations. This has fostered information sharing and collaboration within Pfizer.

Though it required a number of third-party add-ons and partner solutions, Pfizer found SharePoint to be agile and easy to use. Training was handled through a combination of Web-based training and classroom-based training. As implemented, ECF did not require Office 2007. The majority of Pfizer’s collaborative workflow needs were met out of the box with SharePoint; special needs are accommodated via SharePoint Designer, and the remaining 10% were addressed without the need for custom code using K2's BlackPearl product. Pfizer leverages Cisco for load balancing and Avepoint for fine-grained backup and restore.

Pfizer has investigated various ways to recoup the SharePoint costs. Currently, users agree to a per site/sub-site fee and provide a charge code when the site is provisioned for them. This approach provides transparency of the costs, but does not always translate to good information management practices. Other options under consideration are based on a fixed annual per user fee, storage utilization or centralized funding. Pfizer is still determining which model encourages collaboration while also ensuring the number of sites (and potential silos) does not grow out of control and hinder information management.

Governance and usage guidelines. Pfizer put in place a strong governance policy and guidelines for usage of ECF and Documentum. Everyone at Pfizer has their own MySite and the IT leadership encourages business colleagues to create and delete sites often as projects continually come and go. Communication was key; Pfizer created a document platform comparison matrix to help explain the standard tools. It also enabled self-provisioning through an online site request wizard. This requires users to identify document types and proposed use cases for the site to ensure compliance with their governance directives.

Shared Services approach. By implementing SharePoint as a shared services approach and charging back the business, it gave the business transparency into costs and resulted in them taking an active role in self-policing SharePoint sites.

Content valuation exercise. Content migration efforts required the business to pare down content volumes. Though the human effort required was not trivial, the benefits were worth the effort. As part of this assessment, they found that some documents in the organization had not been touched in five years. They were able to reduce storage prior to migration.

Business case and executive sponsorship. Pfizer built its business case on hard dollar savings and cost avoidance: taking servers out of the data center, not renewing software licenses and maintenance, and by reducing costs for support resources associated with legacy systems. Success will be measured by how quickly they can decommission legacy systems, with the anticipation that that will occur by 2010.

Migration. Pfizer's IT team had looked at many third-party tools and tried a few; yet found the current generation of tools and the content migration market to be in its infancy. There is urgent demand for improvement of the tools and for deeper expertise among the consulting services providers. They ended up having to write some of their own scripts to analyze documents and information in their legacy systems to prune. It can be the little things that trip you up — file naming conventions, links in documents; with SharePoint it is easy to break links to documents. If a team site needs to move to completely new or renamed path hierarchy.

Managing business expectations. Management of business expectations across the organization was critical, due to the implications of providing an enterprisewide collaboration solution. Although a formal plan was being managed, attention to the business change elements was varied. Significant business user involvement was required, but the timing coincided with some other key initiatives which required more of their attention. Additionally, the project schedule was influenced by time-restricted funding sources, resulting in unrealistic timelines that forced a reduction in scope to be met.