The Enterprise Content Management Blog

CMS Haters To Gather in NYC

OK, the headline's a little strong, but it did grab your attention.

While I was scanning Twitterville, I noticed CMSWire was microblogging about the upcoming "I Hate My CMS" event in New York City. I'm fairly confident (like you) I could personally sign up a few hundred folks for this one.

The promoters actually nailed it:

"While CMSes are among the most vital systems in digital businesses, they are also among the most cursed due to their limitations and idiosyncrasies."

Most of us know how important content management systems are to serving our markets, but unfortunately there's just as many of us that would rejoice if we never had to touch a CMS toolset again.

According to organizers, the panel will address CMS issues from customer and vendor viewpoints in addition to commentary from a technology analyst. The "tales from the trenches" part should alone be worth the price of admission.

Panelists include:

* Kyle McNabb, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
* Tim Peters, Managing Director, Leading Hotels of the World/LHW.com
* Albert Lee, Director of Technology, New York Magazine

The Society for Information Management (SIM)and the Internet Strategy Forum are hosting the event.

If someone Twitters the event, send along details and I'll be sure to tune in.

 

Technorati tags: content+management, internet+strategy+forum, SIM, technology+events, twitter, microblogging, CMS

First posted @ Information Week's Content Management Blog

Strategies for Deploying ECM

Singapore's ComputerWorld talked to Paul Krueger, FileNet's Asia-Pac Marketing Director, about approaches for deploying ECM.

"Once an organisation standardises on a platform, best practices dictate the need for that organisation to adopt a standard model for content taxonomy and metadata definition, business process/workflow definition, and specific ways for internal ECM subject matter experts to engage with the business to quickly deploy new applications. As part of the project design phase, FileNet’s implementation partner facilitated ECM workshops to create an ECM methodology, with a standardised approach to content security, role definition, and taxonomies. Once these “rules” were established, deployment of the solution would be accelerated."

ECM: The New Strategic Imperative

SDA Asia Magazine featured a piece from Paul Krueger and Mike Powell from FileNet that talks about ECM at length. Their take on ECM business drivers is below.

Business Drivers for ECM

1) Continuous process improvement to reduce costs, improve efficiency and quality of service;

2) Improved corporate accountability, risk reduction and regulatory compliance through content control and process visibility; and

3) Knowledge management and collaboration to support innovation and product development.

ECM Strategy :: Farmers Insurance

Farmers Insurance charted its own course when developing an ECM strategy. Instead of standardizing on a single ECM platform, the company looked to different vendors to build out its ECM infrastructure, settling on Mobius, IBM, and FileNet.

".. what's really saving money is the move to electronic delivery. More than 95 percent of reports are now delivered through the portal, eliminating $600,000 in printing and mailing costs."

More Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Success Stories

Steven Marlin of Information Week writes about how the City of Newark, Thirfty Car Rental , and Corporate Express used ECM to increase revenue and bolster compliance.

The article also mentions Ovum's ECM market projections and what's driving ECM strategies.

"Ovum Research pegs the market for content-management software at $1.6 billion globally, with projected annual growth of nearly 4% for the next five years. "What's driving demand is the explosion of unstructured data and what happens when companies realize that content management is a core business issue," Ovum senior analyst Sarah Kittmer says. "Compliance issues and more-stringent requirements around information retention are requiring companies to do something about unstructured data."

HP talks about their ECM Strategy

Intelligent Enterprise talks to HP's ECM solutions expert Mario Queiroz about how the company has tackled its massive ECM implementation.

From the interview:

How much has HP spent and what can you say about ROI?

"I can only say that the investment is in the millions. It's a major strategic initiative that's been three years in the making. We've had efficiency gains of about 30 percent per year. As an example, we figure we're saving about $6 million per year just from our translation and localization infrastructure. We've also lowered the cost of developing content for new products by more than half. One of the big reasons we made the investment is that it has allowed the company to scale without having to scale equally in manpower, which we would not be able to afford."

Insurance company sees big gains from ECM

Infinity Insurance talks about the benefits of their ECM implementation. The results are below:

• Improved customer service.
• Initial survey indicated 90 percent customer satisfaction.
• Customer service budget reduced by 22 percent.
• Service representative staff reduced by 30 percent.
• Enhanced service levels to agents and brokers via Extranet access.
• No additional magnetic storage required to handle increase in business.
• Microfiche process eliminated.
• Costs and inefficiencies associated with policy copy requests by agents, tape handling, transportation, delays, distribution, and customer service workflow.
• Customer service callbacks virtually eliminated -- 2,000 calls reduced to 100.
• Over 95 percent of customer inquiries answered on customer call-in.