An Agile Enterprise CMS -- What's That?

Effective business decisions depend on having the right information at the right time. The use of content management systems across enterprises to manage information suggests that most companies agree.

Getting the right information to make the best decisions, however, is becoming increasingly difficult as levels of both structured and unstructured content increase daily. The goal of agile content management practitioners is to resolve that. Let's have a look.
 

While it is likely that users of enterprise content management systems will have come across the term Agile ECM before, a great deal of confusion still exists as to what it actually means. This is principally because it is a term that many vendors use to describe their Enterprise CMS products where it does not actually apply.

Working towards a better understanding Agile ECM we will define it as enterprise content management functionality combined with business process management that enables users to access and integrate content quickly and efficiently into business processes. The key ideas here are easy access to content on the one hand, and better business performance on the other.

In a blog post last September Alan Pelz-Sharpe of analyst firm The Real Story group dug into the concept. One important element we focused on was the link between agility and iterations. In Alan's words:

In a truly agile development environment, one learns through an iterative process, whereby a team (or a group of teams) collaborates and continually reviews progress, correcting the path toward the final goal. Enterprise CMS needs to be more like that.

The Cost Of Information

While most enterprise CMS systems were developed to manage content, the proliferation of unstructured content entering enterprises from email, social media, blogs and wikis means that important information is often not available to decision makers without a considerable amount of searching.

Speaking about the issue in an IBM-sponsored webcast last June, Melissa Webster VP for content and digital media at IDC points out that search is not enough. It is costly and does not always produce the right content.

IDC in its Information Worker Productivity Study 2008 – 2009 attempted to quantify how much the act of finding information is actually costing enterprises.

IDC also quantified how much the inability to find the right information costs.

To resolve this, the right content needs to be able to find the right user without them having to go searching for it. The inability to do this is the result of the lack of automation of content enabled or business processes.

Combining business process management and enterprise content management systems to address these problems is known as Agile ECMs.

BPM Characteristics

Before looking at Agile ECMs, it is important to understand what a Business Process Management (BPM) system is. As a term it is often used to describe systems that are not truly BPM systems. However, when Gartner recently published its list of ‘Cool BPM’ vendors for 2010, it clarified what it understood them to be.

BPM software or suites automate business processes and achieve the dual goals of best performance and enhanced efficiency. A BPM suite must include 10 areas of functionality:

1. Process execution and state management engine
2. Model-driven composition environment
3. Document and content interaction
4. User and group interaction
5. Basic connectivity
6. Business activity monitoring (BAM)
7. Simulation and optimization
8. Business rule management
9. System management and administration
10. Process component/registry repository

General Agile Characteristics

Last year's Agile ECM webcast concluded by outlining what the key functions of an Agile ECM are. The problem, contributors agreed, is not so much one of too much content, but one of unlocking information that has been siloed across the enterprise and which is inaccessible to information workers that need it.

Agile ECMs, they agreed, are characterized by four principal capabilities that produce this level of efficiency:

1. Ability to build reports, share information and to make information flow smoothly
2. Making applications and information available
3. Integrating content and processes
4. Flexibility within the system

ECM v Agile ECM Features

While that may be what we thought ECMs did, most are still at a transitory stage and have not achieved true agility. A brief comparison between features shows this:

Additionally — and of increasing importance — Agile ECMs make compliance demands easier to fulfill by making information more accessible.

Research by IBM indicated that finding information for litigation proceedings is the largest uncontrolled cost in corporations, with 28% of companies surveyed estimating that it would take more than a month to find the requested information.

Agile Enterprise Content Management Systems

There are a number of ECMs in the market with agile characteristics — and many more that claim to sport them. Let us look at four examples.

IBM and FileNet

FileNet is IBM's Agile enterprise content management platform. It integrates content with business process management and compliance functionality.

FileNet Business Process Manager was one of the core reasons why IBM went through with the FileNet acquisition in 2006. The BPM Manager is a case-management oriented app with support for Web 2.0 features like mashups and widgets.

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Tags: agile, agile ecm, alfresco, cmis, collaboration, document management, enterprise cms, filenet, ibm, idc, information management, laserfiche, nuxeo, sharepoint, workflow

Effective business decisions depend on having the right information at the right time. The use of content management systems across enterprises to manage information suggests that most companies agree.

Getting the right information to make the best decisions, however, is becoming increasingly difficult as levels of both structured and unstructured content increase daily. The goal of agile content management practitioners is to resolve that. Let's have a look.