Making Enterprise Content Management Easier

End users, especially high-paid end users, refuse to use enterprise content management. Instead they just put documents on shared file drives and send out emails to their colleagues on where they can that information. Can you blame them? Do you like running through a bunch of screens filling in forms and trying to learn new systems to get something done? It reminds me of trying to use the London Congestion charge web site to pay for driving into Central London. It is one of the most awful web sites I have ever seen, but necessary if I want to avoid paying the £50 ($80) penalty fee. Likewise, ECM can be necessary for compliance or even competitive reasons.

The trick to making ECM easier is to fit within the paradigms that users feel comfortable. That means working like the tools that the users already use and may have used for years. Most users do not want to know the details of ECM and would prefer that they remain out of sight and automatic.

There are four main paradigms that users are comfortable working with and would like enterprise content management to conform to these paradigms. Enterprise content management has tried to adapt to these paradigms with mixed success. These paradigms include file browsing, internet-style searching, portals and e-mail.

• File browser and explorer is oldest and simplest paradigm with which users feel comfortable as shared drives companion are the easiest place to store, access and share content of all descriptions. Shared drives are available all the time, including on the road. Many ECM vendors provide a Windows Explorer-like client with content management features and more built in, but users generally do not like these clients as it requires them to use something other than their standard PC environment. The WebDAV and DeltaV protocols provide some of the ECM versioning and locking functionality, but not offline access.

• Google and internet search is a paradigm that has had a huge impact on enterprise content management creating an expectation in users of ease of use and rapid response time. Users want to be able search their repositories at least as fast as the internet. Many ECM vendors have therefore incorporated search engines that mimic Google’s capability and enhanced this search experience with auditing, access control, change histories, process information and the ability to invoke workflows.

• Enterprise Portals consolidate the heterogeneous array of applications and much of the information that end-users want is content from content repositories. Portals themselves are often modeled on consumer portals like Yahoo or AOL. Portals simplify the use and management of content management operations and are the primary interface for using some of the more complex services such as workflow, collaboration, lifecycle, security an administration.

• E-mail is often the knowledge worker’s tool of choice and most knowledge-based business processes are actually conducted through e-mail. Most users would prefer to handle workflow with mail messages containing instructions, links and tools to perform the task required of the user.

• RSS is a new, emerging paradigm of information consumption. The Really Simple Syndication protocol provides XML tags of information that has changed and many tools, including web browsers and e-mail clients, can process RSS streams.

Once ECM standardizes and conforms to these paradigms, we will see a big shift in the way people do their work.

Comments

[Lars Plougmann]

Good point about highly paid users refusing to use ECM. I know a partner in a New York law firm who got so upset with the firm's content management profiling screens that he went to the nearest circuit city, bought a pc wid MS Word installed and put it on his desk. He would put all his documents on a floppy for his secretary to email to others.

Something I would expect to see happening to help adoption in these environments is the task of tagging shifting away from the content author. A level of tagging can be provided by software, parsing hints from the context in which a document was generated. But the most significant level of tagging could be provided by the content consumers.