Gain Value or The Four Expressions of Value in Content Management
18 Aug 2008 - Posted by Daniel Kraft
Every year the industry is waiting for the new reports from the research firms. One of the bigger ones, Gartner, has just released their WCM marketScope and we did extremely well. We scored among the top vendors and Gartner was very complimentary of our offering.
One thing that bothered me was the statement that we run “the risk of still emphasizing the high technical quality of its components and not moving enough toward linking its offering to the business challenges that can be solved with WCM.” I am not questioning that the Gartner team has done a good job and that perhaps we are maybe too “techy”:in our approach but hey, there is room to grow. So I took a group of smart people from the broader Open Text team to a nice cottage at one of those beautiful lakes North of Toronto. Whenever you need a break and you’re looking for a place to clear your mind … get out to the lakes. The fresh air the clear water, some friends, some beers … brilliant. Anyway, we where sitting at the lake front and discussed the true value we can bring to the customer. One thing led to another and we came up with the four expressions of value in Content Management.
Control.
I know- why would a Web guy like me start with the most boring part of our business. Nobody likes control. Even the first comment I got on some of my posts summarized it quite nice: “…problems are uncool, risk is fun”. But when you are the one in charge, you may like to add a little control to it.
Control is a real business value. From a Web perspective control is much more than an archive or a record, it is the foundation. Only if you can have your content come from any source of choice and need it to be in compliance with the applicable rules (like DOD, MoReq or DOMEA) than you get to like the idea of control. But it goes even further. You need to know when people post to your Web site and in a 2.0 environment, you may even want to add a validation layer to assure only appropriate content is posted. Yes my friends, even 2.0 requires control.
So what is the business challenge we solve with this? In many of the public facing sites you have content coming from multiple sources. We spent a huge amount of time and resources to build something that is called the library services. It is your interface into all your content, regardless which repository you use, Livelink, SharePoint, SAP, you name it. So we solved the problem many of our customers had, to fully leverage the knowledge they had already in their organization, while providing the required control to it. And the great thing is, talking a little technical, for most of those repositories we even have the enterprise level of control, our enterprise library services that is applying global records and other legal and regulatory requirements to it.
Experience
Of course this expression is my favorite. Experience is what the Web is all about. Look at some of our customers sites like Rolex, isn’t that a piece of art. The pure joy of experience is complemented with the value experience is adding to it. After now 6 years of providing personalization we have found that an experience also needs to happen in context. Our customers, employees, partners live in a world where Web experience is expected. They shop on Amazon, access news sites from their iPhone. The expectation is that information will be delivered in context to them, the visitor, and content management provides that valuable experience our end-users demand.
Control & Experience the two door keepers of content.
Consider Control and Experience as the two door keepers of content in any organization. Control is keeping things in order while experience is allowing the consumption. If you manage the two well you have made major progress.
Two more to go.
Since I promised you four expressions of value, we have two more to go. While the first two Control & Experience are kind of easy, the next two are more complex. When you look at an organization you will find two ways to become more successful. You can concentrate on the people or you can concentrate on the process and we all know those are linked to each other. Let’s start with the people.
Empower
The main value of content management in the context of people is that we empower them. Think about a room without air … a vacuum. Since sound waves need air to travel the entire room would be very very quiet. Now think of your organization without content … no e-mail, no webpage, no documents, nothing … well, while you may enjoy the first couple of days not working you soon will realize that the entire communication between people is based on sharing information … it is like the water in the water cooler. Without this life preservation element, you will die in a matter of days. There was an episode of a television series called the “Twilight Zone” where the world had been destroyed leaving one man alone with his favorite passion – reading. Standing outside the steps of one of the largest libraries in the world, he did not feel alone, since he had an eternity of knowledge at his disposal. Until he broke his glasses and found that what would have helped him to survive was gone. Information is at the core of our existence and the highlight of our evolution.
We are empowered by what we read, write about, share with our friends via texting, blogging, telephone, meetings or lunch conversations. Empowerment is the idea that we can have control of our communication style to create and consume the water that sustains us, expands our minds and brings excitement to our lives. Within the workplace, the method of communication is changing and the Web is at the core of that information exchange. Whether it is the employee directory or the marketing events list on the public Web page, creating, updating, sharing or removing this content easily, intuitively and on our schedule is where the empowerment value of content management is expressed.
Agility
Since you can’t send the organization to the gym, you might find another way to add agility to your organization. Once you have empowered your people, we need to do the same with your processes. Once we have the processes “empowered”, we have added a new level of agility to the organization. Traditional process management will look at how the process is defined, followed and updated. Wile we can streamline the process of creating, managing, updating and maintaining information to an online community or device, this is just one aspect of the business. Agility in a Web 2.0 world is about how outsiders view our output and how to better enable their usage of our internal processes. Look at the analytical tools applied to Web pages today. Do you know who is accessing your site, from which search engine or bookmark? Are they talking about you on a Google discussion or linked to you from their deli.cio.us site? Is your website easy to navigate on an iPhone or viewable from a Wii? Agility is how your content experts can interact with the information you provide and how well your Web site responds to the request. Imagine that you know where users click the most using a heat map generated view of your Web site. Would you change the way the page was layed out to better facilitate the navigation of the page – of course you would. The next question is how easy is it to change the layout? Agility in a content management system will let you rearrange the images, text and links on the page easily and quickly by those who are the least technical but most interested in the results.
Agility is the optimization of internal processes and tools that help your organization to realize the benefits of the other expressions of value we have discussed thus far. But more importantly, it is also about making it easy for the outsider to communicate with you. Do you allow any visitor to your website to leave a comment on an article or forum to make it more meaningful? Do you embrace this level of communication and learn from it? Imagine the total value of a solution that takes into account the controls in your organization, empowers the people who are responsible for the sharing of information and delivers an exceptional experience that fits into the way your organization works.
To be perfectly honest, we have been working on this for a while and the Gartner report was the perfect opportunity to launch it. Gartner is right; we need to be much more focused on the business value we provide to you. In fact it should be at the center of our thinking. Therefore, we’ll make a radical change to the way we develop and deliver solutions to you.
We will focus on the four outlined expressions of value. Let me know your thoughts and ideas. Is there something that will help you to apply technology better and easier to a business case? Our innovation is with you in mind.