It’s evident these days that organizations have started looking at mobile as a key strategic channel for reaching their customers enabling them to improve market share, increase revenue and provide a better customer experience. Before jumping on the mobile bandwagon, however, organizations need to take stock of the various challenges confronted in mobile publishing and plan to address them. For example, many organizations have found the cost of content creation to be unusually high due to different and unique processes for publishing on the web versus mobile platforms. Similarly, the different versions of content also result in higher content management costs. It therefore becomes essential that organizations look to improve their RoI in mobile publishing through a well- defined publishing strategy. (more…)

For any new Web Content Management implementation, timely and accurate migration of content from an old to a new website is a crucial and critical factor for success. Despite its relative importance, organizations and vendors typically keep the content migration part of the project lower in their list of priorities. This leads to less than favorable outcomes for projects including cost overrun, lower team morale and eventual failure of the implementation.

Any Web Content Management implementation requires a sound strategy and a plan for migrating existing legacy content. (more…)

One of the biggest virtues that any enterprise application should possess is the simplicity of its interface which allows rapid and enthusiastic adoption of the application by its intended users. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and specifically Web Content Management (WCM) solutions are no exception. However the majority of the Enterprise Content Management Solutions available today are surprisingly complex to operate. Though one of the biggest selling pitches used by vendors has been “the enablement of business users in content authoring”, time and again we have seen that reality is difficult to achieve. (more…)

Organizations often develop country portals in silos. Each country/region may have its own IT department, which develops websites that cater to that region’s needs. While this provides a good customized solution catering to a specific country/region’s requirements, the branding and user experience across these various sites for the same corporation becomes very inconsistent. Many organizations have realized this and are actively developing a globalization strategy to create an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform for multi-lingual and multi-cultural business requirements.

Based on my experience working with various global enterprises, I’m jotting down some of the best practices that many organizations typically miss out while developing a globalization strategy. (more…)

While much has been written about Enterprise Content Management (ECM) trends that have come to fruition, not much is talked about those hyped technologies that ‘just passed by’. Even though some of them flopped, they may have manifested themselves in other forms and are still gaining success. I think it’s worth understanding how the underlying concepts still survived and are very much thriving through other means. (more…)

The market of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has historically been misunderstood as many vendors, analysts and customers had their own interpretations of what ECM constitutes.  In my opinion, it includes document and web content management that needs to be put through a work flow in order to publish, with up front capturing / scanning and back office archival and storage.  Throughout its lifecycle, content needs to be available for search, to integrate with business process and downstream analysis of its use for making better business decisions.  ECM also includes delivery of this content in a user–friendly fashion via portals or other rich internet application channels.  At every step it has to carry the content intelligence (meta data) as it traverses through its life and gets consumed by various persona (humans or systems).  Supporting all this with a secure, scalable and flexible architecture is of utmost importance. (more…)