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The future of content management
A company?s information and the ability to harness it are part of the value of their business – information is an asset, says Frank Gilbane.

In our discussions with senior executives, we have found that most know they need to understand the strategic consequences of their organization’s ability and effectiveness at managing and leveraging the information that informs decisions, is communicated to customers, partners and employees, and is part of their products, services, and intellectual property.

A company’s information and the ability to harness it are part of the value of their business – information is an asset. The value of information assets are sometimes easy to measure (e.g., if you sell information), sometimes difficult to measure (e.g., technical documentation) and sometimes impossible to measure with any precision (e.g., employee or institutional knowledge). But in any case, if you are looking at an acquisition, you would be remiss in your due diligence in not considering the value of the target’s information. This value is a function of both the intrinsic asset value, and the ability to harvest and productively use the information assets. Sadly for stockholders, information assets are seldom sufficiently considered in valuations and are usually limited to such basic information like the customer list, or obvious intellectual property assets. Given the volume and velocity of information in today’s economy thanks to the fact that ‘digital information’ is now mostly redundant, effectively managing information needs to be a core corporate competency.

What does all this have to do with content management?
The simple answer is that ‘content management’ and ‘information management’ have become synonymous. While there is always someone who can’t resist carving out a slight difference, in practical terms there is no point in separating them or trying to resist the way the terms have come to be used by normal humans. Why then, you might ask, is content management a relatively recent term while information management has been around far longer?

Well, the basic reason is that information management used to be divided into two very different disciplines, i.e., structured data management and unstructured data management. The former was considered respectable and was largely limited to the management of data from relational databases. The latter was looked down upon by IT organizations and was the focus of organizations that needed to publish documents, which as we all know are unruly, if not chaotic, in their organization and don’t fit the rigid models of relational databases. This document distain was initially carried over to web content, but there was no stopping the web, and the term content management took off with the rocket ship.

The distinction between structured and unstructured data is not entirely useless, but it is mostly irrelevant today since the vast majority of information we have to manage in enterprise applications is a combination of structured and unstructured information, or rather, most of it is unstructured information with incorporated structured data sprinkled throughout. One of the main reasons so many dotcoms were bound to fail was that they promised solutions that integrated structured and unstructured data but were not even close to being able to deliver, or, the maintenance costs of the first generation solutions they built were unsustainable.

Content management today
Today, content management is a mainstream market and technology, or rather a set of technologies. According to CMS Review publisher Bob Doyle, who tracks content management product directories, there are 1879 unique ‘content management’ system products available as of September 2005. (eContent Magazine, December 2005). As Bob points out, there is no consensus on a set of features that make up a CMS, which helps explain why there are so many. In fact, typically organizations have multiple ‘content management systems’ from multiple vendors. For example, a marketing department might choose vendor X because of strong personalization features, but an engineering department might decide that they need a product from vendor B because it is better at managing information in small chunks that can be shared with manufacturing systems. This apparently absurd number of content management systems makes a little more sense giving how big content management is, but most organizations can quickly reduce the number of potential solutions to a couple of dozen or less.

Content management is also becoming a discipline. You can take courses in it, you can join professional organizations like CM Pros (Content Management Professionals – www.cmprofessionals.org), and you can get a job as a ‘content manager’. People who manage content for a living often differ dramatically in what they do, but CM Pros members are finding they have to deal with many of the same problems.

What does all this have to do with the future of content management?
This background is an important aid to understanding the relevance of some of the more obvious, and often short-lived, trends that you or your staff might read about. First of all, it shows how big content management is. Content management is not simply one more enterprise application associated with a specific business function, but a set of capabilities that are part of almost every business function. This means that typical enterprise software category lifecycle expectations do not apply.

Second, content is becoming richer, both in the media sense, e.g., more high resolution graphics, audio, video etc, and at least as importantly, because it is being enhanced with the increased use of metadata.

Third, content is in a very real sense becoming more valuable, not just because it is richer, but because it is increasingly more organized, better managed and therefore more useful, and marketable.

Before we look at some specific factors influencing the future of content management, there is one additional ‘megatrend’ you should keep in mind. That is that the primary use of computing technology continues to evolve to be more for communication than for data processing. Think of the progressive use of computers for numeric calculations, to data processing, to unstructured data and document processing, to web publishing with a steady increase in rich media and metadata, to the incorporation and use of all content types in enterprise applications to better communicate with customers. Content is what we communicate and effective communication is about as fundamental a business requirement as you can get.

The future of the content management market

Consolidation
We have already seen that the need for content management is big. Analyst firms that measure market size have come up with a wide variety of numbers, but all claim the market for content management is in the multiple billions, sometimes tens of billions, of US dollars.

Vendor consolidation is a standard part of software market segment lifecycles. Most analysts would say that there is only room for 3-5 major players in a market segment. In the content management market, this rule of thumb doesn’t work. Because of the size and scope of content management, consolidation will take longer and not be as complete or clean, as usual. There has been considerable M&A activity in the content management market, yet every time there is a merger, multiple new companies enter the market in the time it takes the transaction to complete. In spite of ongoing consolidation the market is growing both in terms of products and in terms of money spent on solutions.

Solution consolidation is a bit more interesting. One example of solution consolidation is what some vendors are referring to as ‘enterprise content management’, by which they mean management of all types of content (web content, documents, records, rich media assets). Another example is the incorporation of search and categorization tools into content management systems. A third, and more complex, example involves the inclusion of some content management capabilities in application servers, e-commerce platforms, and other enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM. This consolidation will keep all of us guessing for a little while and will certainly continue.

Commoditization and specialization
Because content management is critical throughout organizational functions, certain content management capabilities will migrate into infrastructure platforms. This is already happening with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and open source database platforms. This does not, however, mean that the current healthy market for ‘content management vendors’ will go away. First, because there are so many complex horizontal content management requirements that it simply doesn’t make sense to try and include them all in low common-denominator platforms. Second, there are so many diverse vertical content management requirements that there is a huge opportunity for vendors to gain domain expertise and pursue vertical and application specialization opportunities. This is also already happening, and is important to keep in mind since it means some vendors will know more about your industry application than others, and in fact might have in-house experts.

Compliance and control
Compliance deserves special mention as an influence on the future of content management, at least for the near term. While there has been a lot of enthusiasm among vendors about the potential for selling compliance solutions, to date, technology purchases have been modest at best. That could be about to change however. For example, most companies struggled through their first year of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance without the benefit of much technological assistance, and now they have a better idea of the kinds of processes they need to put in place, and are better positioned to implement technology to support the necessary procedures. A recent survey by Information Week claims that 52 percent of the companies in the survey had been driven to implement enterprise content management because of Sarbanes-Oxley. I suspect that most of these companies have actually not yet implemented much, but are planning to. Of course there are, and will be additional regulatory requirements which will also help drive content management development.

Compliance is actually a special case of a more general need for content control. There are multiple aspects to content control:

• Access and authentication. This is not always a job for content management systems, but content management systems will have to be more involved as we use them to manage more granular content components.
• Rules and rights. This is not just about digital rights management (DRM). DRM is only a small part of the more general problem of managing what people can do with content once they have been granted access to it. In business environments, there are many rules and processes that have nothing to do with copyright issues. Our ability to associate rules and workflows with content components based on user or user type (employee, customer, investor, supplier), significantly enhances the utility and therefore value of the content.

It is really worth your time to consider all of these control issues at the same time. A strategic analysis can help prevent implementing multiple overlapping solutions that may conflict with each other’s requirements.

The future of content
There is a mammoth change in content under way that will have a far-reaching effect on content management. There are a couple of different aspects to this. We have already talked about the increased amount of media rich content being created or converted to digital form. This will only accelerate as storage and bandwidth costs plummet, and you can expect content management systems to get better at integrating rich media.

We also described how content now mostly includes both structured and unstructured data. An important aspect of this is that both these types of content are increasingly stored or shared using XML. The reason is that XML does not discriminate between structured and unstructured content and is therefore a powerful tool for application and information integration. Content management solutions benefit from this at least as much as other solutions do. Furthermore, XML is the language being used to share both database information, including legacy databases, and office documents. Content management vendors will have an easier job as the database platforms role out this capability. They will have an even easier job a little further in the future when the embarrassingly old-fashioned files systems we still use are replaced with systems that understand content below the level of a file. Some of this capability should make it into Microsoft’s WinFS file system that is now in beta. The content management solution landscape will certainly be changing dramatically as a result.

In the future most content will be available in XML, or something that is a superset of XML. Two important repercussions are:

• Content will be better organized. Just being in XML helps dramatically, but the growing use of metadata and the development and use of taxonomies will enable content to be both structured and flexible (unlike relational data).
• Content will be more accessible because of this richer organization. New technologies, like XQuery (XML Query Language), that can understand and mine XML content will be expected and required in content management applications.

Many of the goals of visionary content managers such as ‘single-source’ content management have been very difficult to achieve, and a large part of the reason is that the content has not been encoded or organized in a way that would allow effective management. That is all changing, and although it won’t happen overnight it will happen, and at increased acceleration.

This fundamental change in the nature of digital content is what will have the most profound and far-reaching effect on the future of content management.

The future of content management technology
Most organizations are only beginning to understand how primitive industry still in terms of managing content. The technology is actually way ahead of our experience in using it to create and manage richer, more organized content. Nonetheless, there is plenty of room for improvements in existing content technology. Here we briefly describe five technology areas that will have an impact on future content management applications and that need to be considered when you are developing an enterprise content management strategy.

Linguistic analysis tools. In addition to the new search technologies mentioned above just being deployed that understand XML, there has been an enormous increase in the development of linguistic analysis tools for searching, categorization, and summarization. This technology is not magic, but is becoming ever more useful.

Content services. There is a lot of hype surrounding ‘web services’. However, when you peel away all the propaganda, you find new ways of talking about incremental progress on a very good idea (“distributed object computing”, “object-oriented programming”, etc.) that has been around for many years. In terms of content management, we think this trend is important because supporting distributed content should be easier than supporting distributed content plus code. In addition to being easier, much, perhaps most, of the business value of web services may be achievable without distributed code. It is true that the distinction between code and content continues to grow fuzzier, but we still expect to see content services role out sooner than full-fledged web services.

Open source. Open source is of course not a specific technology, but there are plenty of open source content management systems, and commercial systems that have open source components. As certain content management features become commoditized they will appear in different types of open source tools, and content management deployments will include and be complemented by open source components.

Lightweight collaboration and content tools. Blog, wiki, and RSS are all examples of extremely low cost (many of these are open source) and easy to deploy technologies that will affect the future of content management both directly and indirectly. Blogs and wikis are often referred to as “social software”, which has the unfortunate effect of perpetuating the perception that these tools are not really suitable for enterprise use. In fact, use of these tools for business applications is becoming widespread, though it is mostly under the radar of IT and management. These are not replacements for traditional content management systems, but they affect the future of content management directly, because they replace some content management products for simple applications where a real content management system is overkill and wasn’t necessary in the first place, and indirectly, because there are lots of ways a CMS and these technologies complement each other.

New content technology stacks. In the previous section we talked about the changing nature of content and the profound effect it will have on the future of content management. From a technical point of view, how are we going to build infrastructures to effectively leverage this richer, more sophisticated content? With content management functionality now critical to all major business applications, and with the need to track some content all the way through its lifecycle, we need to be able to manage content in ways that transcends individual applications. Where in the technology stack do various content management functions belong? And where in the stack should the “content platform”, if such a thing makes sense, reside? In an ECM repository? A database? A search index? A metadata repository? A file system? This question doesn’t have a simple or single answer, and ECM, enterprise search, database and operating system vendors naturally have differing views on this. You can expect all of these technologies to be influenced by these questions and the world of content management is going to look very different as these technologies vie for primacy.