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In 2010, IT spending will return to positive growth in many regions signaling that the decline seen in 2009 has been arrested. Among the key technologies forecast to return to double digit growth is content management (revenue is expected to grow at 11.1% in 2010) driven by both cost savings and the benefits that enterprises expect to get in return from improvements in the management of content. From the interactions with clients and our research, ten key projects emerge as top priorities in the agenda of the CIOs and IT leaders involved in content management:
- Composite content apps: case management.
- Cloud-based content management.
- Content management as a path to enterprise information management.
- Electronic discovery readiness.
- Enhanced search with content analytics.
- Legacy information management.
- Next-generation Web content management.
- Shared services for ECM.
- SharePoint for enterprise content management.
- Video content management.
Although most companies expect to return to growth in 2010 to 2011, many will continue to look for cost optimization projects as they did in the past three years (see Figure 1, which shows the results from our survey conducted in December 2007). To help you with your content management projects for 2010, this research provides a basic high-level view on where to position these projects in terms of their impact. However, achieving the expected ROI depends heavily on the organization's maturity, the sponsorship and the history of its content management and IT investments in the past five years. The benefits provided in Table 1 for the ten key content management projects are relative to the average organization and to the opportunities for cost savings. Some of these projects can be justified entirely on the basis of the savings from eliminating expenses completely (legacy information management). In other situations, the project can help reduce business expenses in a lasting and transformative way (case management, e-discovery, content in the cloud, SharePoint, shared services for ECM). In other situations, projects can mainly be justified on the basis of their transformation and business growth potentials (next-generation Web content management, search and content analytics, video content management and enterprise information management. See Figure 2). Figure 1. What Is Driving Investments In Content Management? 
Note: On a scale of 1 to 7, how would you rate the importance of the following factors in your organization's decision to invest in content management software? Mean Summary Table: 1 = Not at all important, 7 = Extremely important.
Survey information: 467 responses collected worldwide; 212 from the U.S., 162 from Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and 93 from Asia/Pacific.
Source: Gartner (December 2007)
We recommend that CIOs and IT professionals:
- Examine their content management project portfolio to assess cost savings and benefits of each project.
- Balance possible savings against the risk and complexity of each project.
- Balance the portfolio of CM projects to optimize overall return.
Figure 2. Content Management Projects: Innovation vs. Efficiency 
Source: Gartner (April 2010)
2.0 The 10 Key Content Management Projects of 2010
Table 1. The Benefits of Your Content Management Projects
Composite Content Apps: Case Management |
Cost savings and Process Compliance and Efficiency |
Base configurations of key suite components for composite content application (CCA) solutions like case management are a logical progression of the ECM (and sometimes business process management [BPM] solutions) value proposition. There is growing consensus, evidenced by industry analyst surveys and enterprise ROI analysis, that this should not happen through one-off custom code as in the past, but instead by taking advantage of repeatable knowledge gained over years of similar implementations by service providers — and sometimes by software vendors, too.
Recommendations:
- Content management or business process suite buyers should consider issuing RFPs for case management with an emphasis on near-term cost recovery and out-of-box functionality such as base configurations. Look for proof points, ROI calculations, benchmarks and best practices for emerging suite frameworks and templates such as case management.
- Because composite content applications can provide great value if defined by domain experts, enterprises should ask for references from the vendor's service partners as well as the software vendor itself.
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Content in the Cloud |
Cost Savings and Deployment Flexibility |
Cloud architectures are becoming real and attractive. "Content in the cloud," whether via hosted multitenant services or software as a service (SaaS) for content management, will grow in tandem with those markets. IT managers in charge of content management projects need to know where these deployment models are appropriate and where the risks are too high.
Recommendations:
- Use content in the cloud where speedy deployment of content management and low cost are key.
- Consider carefully before using hosted providers for information that must remain confidential, such as intellectual property, because they cannot ensure absolute security.
- When deploying content in the cloud, focus on service levels (a critical issue) and results, not on IT methodologies. These deployment models require a different approach to management than IT professionals are used to with on-premises software.
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Electronic Discovery Readiness
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Cost Savings, Compliance and Risk Avoidance |
The legal landscape around electronic information is changing rapidly and many enterprises are making assessments, buying technology and making plans around e-discovery. Those who are looking to reduce the costs of litigation or regulatory inquiry must decide what, if any, part of the process of e-discovery should be brought in house.
Recommendations:
- Get baseline business case numbers on the number of lawsuits your company is engaged in and the amount of data that has been collected in previous actions.
- Organizations in litigious industries that are already carrying out e-discovery as a regular business process need to refine and automate their processes with selected tools this year.
- Examine vendor claims with the utmost care, as the vacuum of knowledge and expertise around electronically stored information (ESI) in the legal community is being exploited.
- Consider creating a position that serves as a liaison between legal and IT and that can speak the language of both, i.e., the IT legal professional.
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Legacy Information Management |
Cost Savings and Compliance and Risk Management |
Legacy information, which includes content and data stored in existing repositories, file shares, archives and databases, poses one of the most underestimated risks to enterprises and hinders productivity. Many enterprises simply let legacy information accumulate because they do not think it is worth bothering about, because they believe it is inexpensive to store or because they do not want to throw away anything of potential value. The masses of documents and files accumulated over time make it difficult for users to find truly valuable content and for the IT and legal departments to find information requested by regulators or lawyers in discovery processes. The enterprise runs the risk of substantial fines for non-compliance, and virtually every process becomes slower and less effective when users struggle to find the right information in a timely manner. Legacy information management should be considered within the context of an overall enterprise content management strategy.
Recommendations:
- Define your approach to legacy information management based on what the enterprise needs to do with this information, such as mining it for insights into product development or, to comply with industry regulations.
- Develop formal information retention policies for the broad range of content that needs to be managed.
- Take into account the many different technologies involved in information retention when you devise a procurement strategy; it can save considerable time and money.
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Enhanced Search with Content Analytics |
Business Growth and Transformation |
Inexpensive and reliable enterprise search products now are available from megavendors. However, many enterprises require specialist capabilities from products targeted at solving particular problems, and so content analytics technologies are finding expanded roles in a variety of applications.
Recommendations:
- Establish use cases with personas and particular business problems to justify the acquisition of new search or content analytics technology. Assign resources to determine its potential and pursue it.
- Characterize such business problems as strategic (enhancing revenue or reducing costs) or tactical (facing neither). Strategic problems deserve significant expenditures and efforts; tactical problems do not.
- Consider expenditures on information architects to tune and maintain any advanced analytics, on IT workers to maintain hardware on which the software runs, and on the design of relevancy pipelines for search or process flows for content analytics.
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SharePoint for ECM |
Cost Savings and Worker Productivity |
Organizations of all sizes and across all geographies are considering or evaluating Microsoft SharePoint Server because of the breadth of capabilities offered and because Microsoft is already one of their strategic infrastructure providers. As SharePoint takes hold in an organization, users naturally begin exploring its suitability for a wider range of content management applications and its potential as a replacement for existing solutions.
Recommendations:
- Investigate whether Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (or SharePoint 2010 when it ships) might be sufficient on its own or whether it will be best utilized as an adjunct to another content repository.
- Assess the potential points of overlap, redundancy and conflict between the ECM and SharePoint environments, and create a program for periodic monitoring and evaluation to prevent them from becoming a problem.
- Create governance guidelines on when to base applications on SharePoint or on the production-level ECM platforms.
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Shared Services for ECM |
Cost Savings and Reduction of Siloed CM |
Shared-services approaches to deploying enterprise content management are gaining traction. With a shared-services delivery model, an enterprise purchases ECM functions centrally and governs the types of services offered, while granting users a degree of ownership over specific implementations. Shared services can save money, improve information sharing and help the IT organization overall.
Recommendations:
- Assess whether shared services make sense for your enterprise. That is, determine which delivery model — for example, conventional software licensing, hosting or shared services — best suits its needs.
- Focus on a single ECM product or vendor platform as a backbone, and supplement it with other products only if needed.
- Define packages of ECM functions, based on the specific needs of departments and their potential user base.
- Establish a governance model for service and support.
- Form a competency center for ECM.
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Video Content Management |
Worker Productivity and Increase Clients and Partners Engagement |
Government and commercial enterprises are intrigued by the collaborative and operational possibilities inherent in providing shared video content services that mimic popular online sites such as YouTube. Collaboration managers, security and compliance officers, CIOs, marketing professionals, intranet and portal managers, and website managers all will find that informally generated video content is an increasingly valuable and popular aspect of their strategies.
Recommendations:
- Treat asynchronously delivered video (whether called downloadable video, streaming video or video-on-demand) differently from the way other content is treated. It is more inflammatory, more engaging, more compelling and consumes more storage than other content types.
- Keep your video project simple. Users want simple upload, search, metatagging and social sharing features.
- Heed the most significant benefits of video and seek to create policies and incentives that will provide users with guard rails for how and why to use video.
- Improve video management duties through assigning workers to a specific role addressing it.
- Recognize that asynchronous video is linked to, but different from, video conferencing and associated real-time communication tools.
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Next-Generation Web Content Management |
Increase Product Revenue and Customer Engagement. Cost Savings, Reduction of Siloed Content and Worker Productivity
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The idea of an "intelligent, optimized online presence" that allows targeted content to be served to visitors is gaining credible and accelerated traction in the market. Arguments about enhanced effectiveness of delivery grounded in results-oriented and measurably successful online solutions will be the key metrics used. In this area, organizations will need to seek synergies with adjacent technologies, such as recommendation and Web analytics. Boundaries with these technologies and their respective markets will blur, as some of the WCM vendors begin to provide some of these capabilities in their own offerings.
Recommendations:
- Work with business leaders to define the desired goals, benefits and resultant key performance indicators (KPIs) that will guide the selection and use of advanced WCM capabilities for understanding user behaviors and context.
- Design websites around these KPIs.
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Content Management as a Path to EIM |
Reduction of Siloed Content, Improvement of Information Quality, Ability to Discover Patterns and Worker Productivity |
Enterprises spend large portions of their IT budgets year after year on applications to create and manage information. Unfortunately, the users who carry on the business cannot access most of this information because many of the applications and repositories that the enterprise has accumulated over the years do not interoperate. In addition, the IT organization and business units waste money buying technologies that duplicate what has already been implemented elsewhere in the enterprise. By 2011, the demand for information consistency and interoperability will drive architects and planners in Global 2000 enterprises to adopt an "information infrastructure," that is, a technology framework for managing structured and unstructured data across the organization. An information infrastructure rationalizes data representations and enables users to conduct business without being bound to application-specific formats or proprietary protocols.
Recommendations:
- Understand the distinction between information infrastructure and related efforts such as enterprise information management (EIM), enterprise content management (ECM) and master data management (MDM) to avoid confusion and political fights.
- Strike a balance between realigning the people and teams that must be involved in information infrastructure and tapping the expertise that the enterprise has already developed.
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Source: Gartner (April 2010)
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