Re: Knpwledge Management

["Amanda A" <bluestreaker1977 -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

2 articles from fortune (as I look for the one everyone wants)

DAVID KIRKPATRICK
Document Overload: Managing the Digital Paper Chase
In an era of growing regulatory demands, companies increasingly need access
to every bit of data their employees ever produced. That's the challenge and
opportunity that faces the Enterprise Content Management industry.
FORTUNE
Thursday, June 3, 2004
By David Kirkpatrick


Think managing your e-mail has gotten more difficult the last few years?
Imagine the challenges facing your employer. Not only does it need to retain
just about every message you and your colleagues ever sent, but it has to
know where those messages are and what they say. Just to make things more
interesting, the company also has to save memos, reports, billing documents,
and much more. In an era of growing demands for regulatory compliance and
corporate transparency, companies increasingly need access to every bit of
data their employees ever produced.

That's the challenge and opportunity that faces the Enterprise Content
Management industry. ECM, as it is known, has continually mystified me since
the acronym was invented in the mid-'90s. While over the years I met with a
number of the companies that labeled themselves that way, I never came away
with a clear sense of what this business was about and why. But last week I
got a tutorial from an expert-Tom Jenkins, CEO of Open Text, a top ECM
company. It helped that Jenkins, a Canadian, is a convivial fellow who's
good at explaining his opaque business.

The way he puts it, ECM is about the management of words just like
Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, is about numbers. "Back in the early
'80s," he says, "one plus one equals two was easy for a computer to handle.
So to recognize an employee, for instance, you had to give them a number.
Databases, on which ERP is based, are rows and columns of numbers. But now
the majority of the information in a corporation is words-content generated
by the Internet, either e-mail or web pages." Aggregate word content
worldwide is growing at a staggering rate-by some estimates doubling as fast
as every few months.

"ECM is the digital version of the paper chase," Jenkins continues. "That
means finding a document, modifying it, distributing it to others, and then
storing it for future use. To find it you use a search engine. Modifying it
is document management. When you share it with others, that's collaboration.
Person-to-person collaboration is e-mail. And storing it is archiving." All
are fundamental components of ECM, which Jenkins says is like an index to
the book of a company's past.

Open Text itself has a storied past and a surprisingly vital present. It's
headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, which some call "Canada's Palo Alto,"
though many employees work in Chicago, where Jenkins maintains his office.
Open Text started in the early 1990s as the Google of its day. It was a
highly praised search engine used by Yahoo, which gave it stock as part of a
deal in the mid-'90s. It went public in 1996 as one of the first Internet
IPOs ever. Open Text later reaped hundreds of millions of dollars selling
its shares of Yahoo and other Internet companies. But what keeps this from
being the story of yet another Internet flameout is that it used the money
to exit the consumer business and become an enterprise software company. The
search engine technology that got Open Text started still anchors its work
in ECM, because searching a company's data is a big part of the challenge.
The company's market capitalization today is $1.4 billion, and its stock
trades near its all-time highs, almost double the price of a year ago.

Open Text is one of four fast-growing competitors that lead the ECM field.
Each has revenues in the $250 million to $450 million range. The biggest,
though not by much, is FileNet. Open Text probably comes next, though it's
impossible to tell, because the other two big players are subsidiaries of
IBM and EMC, within which their numbers are subsumed. Until last year
Documentum was a big independent player, but EMC bought it. Yes, EMC bought
an ECM company. No wonder guys like me have trouble disentangling all this
stuff.

IBM's involvement is a heritage of its long-ago purchase of Lotus and the
Lotus Notes product, which, along with Novell NetWare, was one of the
industrial grandparents of ECM. These early pre-Internet products were the
first to build an entire architecture for organizing and managing a
corporation's unstructured non-numeric data.

What separates this group of companies from another dozen or so smaller
players is that each now has-mostly because of steady industry
consolidation-a complete suite of capabilities and products. Meanwhile,
Microsoft has a simpler product, SharePoint, making progress at the low end
of the market, especially for small businesses.

Why has managing documents and e-mail in a corporation gotten so
complicated, so fast? In Jenkins' view, regulators are demanding more and
more accountability simply because they can: "The combination of 9/11 and
Enron both happening within months of each other completely changed the
environment. 'Who wrote the e-mail?' 'Who destroyed the e-mail?' 'Why didn't
I get the e-mail?' Those are the watchwords of our society now."

The latest hot area in ECM is what's called Knowledge Management- KM to
those in the know, of course. What that's about is figuring out how or why
something happened in an organization. Government investigators, for
instance, may need to know exactly what decision-making process a company
went through before launching a drug or building an aircraft part in a
certain way. Says Jenkins: "This becomes, in a catch phrase our industry
uses, the 'corporate memory.' Knowing how things were decided is absolutely
critical." He describes knowledge management as "like a Google search that
comes with a video of how the document you found was actually created."

ECM is approximately a $2.5 billion industry growing at 20% to 25% a
year-one of the fastest-growing parts of a still-sluggish IT industry. As
consolidation continues in this rapidly maturing business, Jenkins holds
that Open Text will be a consolidator and survivor. Given the marketing
savvy he demonstrated at our lunch, I wouldn't doubt it.



     Content Management
     Without the right technology aggregating massive amounts of
information within an organization is maddening.

     Marketing bulldog John Doe, a vice president of Company X, is in pain.
Rhonda from IT just called. "Our servers are full; there's not enough room
to store the multimedia demos." Product managers are clamoring to get copy
and images for new products up on the Web-today. Sales wants to know, "Why
aren't we personalizing our promotions like our competitors are?" Europe's
latest complaint: they don't have the latest datasheets to translate. And
here's Doe-in the middle of budget planning-wondering how to meet all these
demands.

     The agony Doe feels centers around his inability to get his arms
around the company's content-text, images, and media. Not its data, the
typical stuff that IT deals with in a few waves of their magic wand. Its
unstructured, unruly, sometimes staggering in size, and constantly changing
content. And this content just happens to be critical to delivering his
marketing message and achieving the company's strategic goals.

     Doe's dilemma is not unique. He often commiserates with his cohorts in
training, documentation, technical support, and human resources. They share
war stories of how information overload is bogging them down. "Who can ever
find anything on those ser-vers? It's like a giant rat's nest," sighs Sara
from HR.

     Doe is spurred to action. He knows content problems are costing the
company money. Having heard about systems that address these problems, Doe
brings the idea of a content management system (CMS) to the executive team.

     CEO Richard Sellen is initially hesitant, but the evidence is clear:
content is key to the company's business objectives.

     Sellen anoints Doe as content management champion-not an easy job
since hundreds of content management technology solutions have appeared over
the past five years. The systems have names that are an alphabet soup of
acronyms-WCM, DM, DAM, and ECM.





     Web content management (WCM) systems are designed for creating,
storing, and publishing content for Web sites (including public sites,
intranets, and extranets). Document management (DM), which has been around
longer, helps companies organize and categorize documents-making them easy
to find. Digital asset management (DAM) systems specialize in handling
images and media. The latest term in the soup bowl is ECM, "enterprise
content management," an umbrella term for all of the above with the capacity
to scale across an entire enterprise.

     Hardware and software makers like StorageTek, based in Louisville,
Colo., quickly uncovered the costs and risks associated with storing and
managing enterprise content. Far too few companies devote adequate attention
to storage before it is too late. According to Pat Martin, StorageTek
chairman, president and CEO, "It's a matter of strategy. Simply responding
and reacting to storage needs on a tactical basis compounds a storage
problem that is already at crisis levels. It is essential to take a
strategic approach."

     StorageTek sees that content storage needs are reaching a mass and
complexity that exceed the bounds of human intervention. Content volumes are
growing faster than storage management productivity is improving. Storage
managers are expensive and scarce, while storage budgets are flat or
shrinking.





     Rather than simply adding more and more capacity, StorageTek takes a
different approach. Their solution is to improve fundamental cost
structures, improve manageability, provide an appropriate level of data
protection, and ensure investment protection. Martin goes on to say, "All
digital content is not created equal. It follows a life cycle." Content
contributes most to revenue generation early in its life cycle. As content
ages, its value is reduced.

     At every point in the content life cycle, there are opportunities to
reduce cost. Effective life cycle management is one of the ways businesses
can realize exceptional savings in their IT departments while creating the
optimum performance for their content-by putting it in the right place at
the right time for the right cost.

     One of the forefathers of content management software is Arbortext.
Since 1982 this Michigan-based company has provided software solutions to
help authors create content in ways that make it most accessible to the
systems and people who depend on it. They do so by taking advantage of a
format called XML, kind of a second cousin to HTML, the language used to
create Web pages.

     XML eases the process of sharing content both inside and outside the
enterprise. Not only does XML put structure around content-making it easier
to find and publish-it enables business systems to actually see and use
content that resides within documents.

     Long-time Arbortext customer Greg Johnson leads a content management
project at Medtronic, the world's leading producer of medical devices.
"We've been using Arbortext's editing and publishing tools for years," says
Johnson. With content management Medtronic has higher document quality,
faster time-to-market, and reduced translation costs. "Being able to get our
products out to global audiences quickly has been a key strategic
advantage."

     The upsides of content management are undeniable, but it carries its
share of costs and risks. Some technologies are expensive and only partially
proven. The market is littered with vendors and implementers that have gone
astray. This makes choosing a vendor tricky.

     As Andrew Warzecha, senior vice president of META Group, a leading
information technology research and consulting firm, explains: "Players in
the content management space will continue to consolidate through 2003.
Companies should aggressively evaluate a vendor's long-term viability and
strategy before deciding on a system."

     Despite the challenges, the rewards of implementing a content
manage-ment strategy are enticing. When done right, content management eases
content pain. Even more compelling-well-managed content is a key competitive
differentiator that can lead companies like Doe's to the head of the pack.

     Rita Warren, President of ZiaContent, Inc., is an independent content
management consultant based in Seattle, Washington.





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