A Buyers Guide - Sel

Today’s companies are vying to effectively address the data explosion. Huge amount of content is being generated on a daily basis in a variety of enterprises, globally. Most enterprises are facing operational issues with content creation, content management, and content distribution. The result of the content explosion is from increasing business complexity, the efforts to enhance quality, mass customization & transformation in global markets, and the variety of systems and applications housing enterprise content. The content originating from various functional sub-systems is highly uncluttered and ranges from word documents, PowerPoint files, images, spreadsheets, graphics, archived files, e-mails, and videos, which are usually stored on shared network drives, websites, individuals’ laptops, custom applications, FTP sites, or even on hosted servers and applications.

Organizations across all major verticals manage several instances of functional data, but mostly lack in framing effective content management techniques to consolidate this content and ensure its consistency, integrity, and confidentiality. Since the content is extracted from disparate databases, data marts, unstructured transactional databases, and knowledge stores, it results in multiple, inconsistent data views, inefficient repository design, duplication of redundant data, and system-wide errors. The redundancy of data entries, missing values, and unstructured data formats are becoming cumbersome issues for enterprises while deploying specific web content management tools. Digital content is increasingly being used in courts during litigation as an essential tool for prosecution, and the government is continually enforcing compliance with new regulations and mandates regarding extraction, handling, and archival of digital content.

The key challenges from a business perspective, when dealing with content within an enterprise these days, are searching, locating, and then accessing the right content at the right time and in the right manner and ensuring compliance to procedures and policies that revolve around accessibility, authorization, protection, and disposition of content. Enterprise content management solutions are essential as they ensure the mobility and interoperability of the organizational content. Also, enterprise content management solutions are vital in framing access and control policies in content sharing systems. Distribution of enterprise content across various geographies needs to be managed in an efficient fashion to ensure consistency and integrity in the content flow across different geographies and platforms.

For commercial clients, deploying a Web Content Management (WCM) system can be an extensive as well as a very expensive process. An enterprise needs to plan a sequence of suitable steps to ensure the best fit between a WCM system and organizational initiatives and goals. This white paper offers a general understanding of WCM, the pre-requisite assessments that need to be conducted while evaluating a WCM for any commercial enterprise, and the typical business challenges encountered during the deployment of WCM.