Canadian government agencies have pegged content management as a
top IT priority this year. Fair enough, bearing in mind that
research makes clear that one size definitely doesn't fit all.
Marketers position the many guises of content management as an
indispensable housecleaning mechanism, a means to sort scattered,
unstructured information and sweep up the clutter of unwanted
paperwork. But governments, and other public sector agencies, for
the most part have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.
Vendors try to differentiate their products on the back of
targeted branding, finely tuned tweaks and niche repackaging. They
label technology as a solution to every concept, however plausible,
of information and knowledge management. "Innovative" products
promise to get a handle on everything from Web content, e-forms,
cases, contracts, digital assets and other documents, to records
and retention, risk, compliance and regulation.
Customers, meanwhile, want to enhance business efficiency, drive
employee productivity and improve service delivery, and,
particularly in the public sector, keep costs down. Technology can
provide the tools. But the content management market remains sorely
lacking and is struggling to keep pace with customer demand,
suggests a survey headed by Kyle McNabb, senior analyst for
Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.
"Todayb s reality is that many content management suite offerings
cannot effectively address the divergent needs of IT and lines of
business," says McNabb.
"No single vendor can address the full spectrum of
transactional, business and persuasive content that ranges from
supporting back-office processes to selling products and services
via the Internet."
Lost in the forest
By way of example, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (Agri-Can)
relies on the federal government's records, document and
information management system (RDIMS) from Toronto-based
Hummingbird Ltd. Ten years on, the department is still plugging in
"point solutions," developing customized functionality with
additional application layers and running pilot projects of
supplemental software.
That approach is not without success; Agri-Can was honoured with
a silver award of excellence by the Canadian Information
Productivity Awards last year, for its development of an "executive
correspondence" management system. RDIMS, however, hadn't proved
capable of tracking e-mail and other correspondence, and Agri-Canb s
existing "correspondence tracking and briefing system," a separate
product, didn't integrate well with RDIMS.
Agri-Can had to call in a systems integrator, Montreal-based CGI
Group Inc., to write a new application layer on top of RDIMS to
meet its content management requirements. "RDIMS comes with generic
metadata for document management; we then added to it for the
specific business process," explains Jeff Lamirande, Agri-Can's
assistant director of information management utilities.
Recently Agri-Can also has been trying out a product from
Interwoven Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Lamirande says
Hummingbird's RDIMS gave him the tools to create a good foundation
for internal records and document management, but Web content
management presented new challenges.
"It's a matter of timing for where you want to start," says
Lamirande. "We wanted to start with managing the basics and the
Hummingbird suite, with its document and records management,
workflow and reporting component, was the place to start.
"By getting a good grasp on our content internally and primarily
by managing versions, access, distribution and research, it gave us
the proper foundation."
But when it comes to Web content management, with its publishing
and portal challenges, the issue becomes business-context
sensitive, he adds. "RDIMS came first, and that evolved with
increased functionality from Interwoven."
Lamirande says Interwoven started with Web content management
and later added the document management basics. Conversely,
Hummingbird's strength lies in records management, but it now also
sells the publishing and collaboration side.
"It's a freaky world right now," Lamirande says. "Everybody does
pretty much the same stuff in different ways and you've got to
decide as a client. That's what we're facing right now: Interwoven
and Hummingbird can do the same things."
Lamirande says that, depending on what the government decides to
do, he may have to look at different scenarios, for example using
one product suite for some functions and another suite for
others.
Barking up the wrong tree
If content management purports to help organizations create a
taxonomy, or hierarchical classification structure, for sorting and
managing information and knowledge, perhaps information lifecycle
management (ILM) should also be given a part in the play.
ILM is typically the territory of storage vendors like EMC,
Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance (NetApp) and StorageTek. But
both content management and ILM claim to address issues such as
information policies, management processes, governance and change
management. In both cases, policies are determined by business
objectives.
NetApp, for example, defines ILM as "a strategy that allows you
to make intelligent decisions about how you manage your
information."
Records and document management is about moving information
around an organization, tracking version control and allowing the
software to make logical decisions that have already been set as
business rules, according to Dan Larocque, industry manager for
Hummingbird's government sector.
And Dan Ryan, COO of Stellent Inc., a content management vendor
with headquarters in Eden Prairie, Minn., says records and
retention management maintains metadata about content in various
document repositories performs legal holds and disposes of and
deletes content.
Content management becomes a storage issue and should form a
part of ILM, says Christine CC4tC), certified content management
specialist for IBM Canada Ltd. "Managing the information lifecycle
of objects means those objects have to be stored in a content
management [repository]. The whole thing about ILM is you have to
take the information from the cradle to the grave, to the final
disposition.
"You have to manage it with all the security around it and you
have to optimize storage costs. That is all content
management."
Because content management and ILM are so closely related and
perform similar functions with common objectives, customers may
want to look at ILM if theyb re not happy with their content
management systems, says Alison Brooks, senior analyst, government,
for IDC Canada.
"ILM aims to (marshal) your information to make strategic
decisions about what kind of information you need to use and when,"
she says. "It aims to help an organization align its policies and
processes with its business values in the most cost effective way."
Ripe for the picking
Brooks says Canadian IT spending in government will swing
dramatically towards content management this year.
A recent technology and government survey by IDC Canada
indicated a shift in top policy and program priority, from
electronic service delivery to more content management.
Brooks says government agencies have been focused over the past
three or four years on building the top layer of delivering
e-service, static informational Web sites, call centres and
inter-transactional portals. "But really there are seven or eight
more layers of land mass to deal with under the waterline, under
the tip of the iceberg," she says.
This year will see a big push to information lifecycle
management and content management, says Brooks, citing integrated
case management, CRM technologies, document management, records
management and information lifecycle management as leading
requirements.
"The drivers are not so much regulation and compliance," she
says. "There is some risk management, but mostly the push is coming
from digitization and the need to collaborate better
inter-jurisdictionally and intra-jurisdictionally."
Content management is perceived by government as closely tied to
business intelligence, customer relationship management (CRM) and
data warehousing, as well as a merger between business intelligence
and business process automation, says Brooks. "For this reason,
portal technologies are high priority, especially at the federal
level."
Already faced with increasing service expectations and financial
constraints (with the exception of Alberta and the federal
government), government also has to cope with the same crunch in
human resources, says Brooks.
"With all the retiring baby-boomers, what theyb re finding is
their knowledge capital is walking out the door over the next 5 to
10 years. And they really do want to capture and organize those
chaotic systems before that happens."
Another issue government has to deal with is trying to integrate
and organize information in a lot of disparate and legacy systems
across different departments, says Brooks. "They're very wedded to
the customizations they've made to those systems and they think
they're very unique. They definitely resist attempts to standardize
the service experience, because managing that flow of information
has been intensely difficult for them."
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