Piecing it together

CXO. With the amount, variety and complexity of data used and stored within an organisation constantly on the rise, what challenges do enterprises face today when it comes to effectively using, sharing and storing that data?

SP. The content challenges facing enterprises today are enormous, but can be characterised in terms of three distinct areas. The first of these is the exponential growth of all enterprise content. In today’s knowledge-based economy, the amount of information is literally exploding. In the last 30 years, more information has been produced than in the previous 5000 years. This unprecedented growth makes it increasingly difficult for today’s knowledge workers to do their job.

Secondly, there has been a disproportionate expansion of unstructured content. What is keenly difficult to manage for today’s companies is the fact that 85 percent of this hyper-growth occurs in the area of unstructured data (e.g. emails, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF files etc.). Unstructured content is difficult to manage, as the business information it contains is not easily accessible. Unstructured information contains valuable business information – but it is almost impossible to find.

Thirdly, there is the challenge of information locked in content silos. Most business applications have their own specific and proprietary ways of interacting with information. The result is that today’s enterprises have invested fortunes in systems that isolate valuable business content in proprietary silos that cannot be accessed by other applications. The most valuable asset that a company has – the information about its specific business, its processes, products, customers etc – is not accessible for most of the business systems and business users!

CXO. What advice would you give an enterprise looking to unlock their information assets?

SP. Enterprises must break up their content silos in order to unlock the information trapped inside. This can be an expensive and a complex task, but there is a solution. Under the leadership of Day Software, an expert group of leading vendors has developed a standardised way to access all enterprise content. This industry-wide standard (JSR 170) clearly defines how to interact with the content that resides in the various repositories. Day’s standardised approach to content repositories enables companies to substantially reduce the complexity and cost of accessing the information in their information systems.

To this end, it is critical that enterprise content solutions be based on open, industry-accepted standards. Open standards provide obvious benefits of increased freedom of choice and avoiding vendor lock-in when those standards are widely supported, well defined and have a sufficiently broad scope. Open system repositories provide greater flexibility and stability, greater immunity against technology. Ultimately, providing a substantial reduction of complexity and cost while dramatically increasing the interoperability between business applications and enterprise content.

CXO. Why is getting this information important – how can better management and access be translated into better decision-making and ultimately achieving the competitive edge?

SP. As access to content gets faster, better and cheaper, data redundancy is eliminated, the quality goes up and the overall cost goes down, companies can begin to leverage these advances and truly experience business agility, and gain competitive advantage.

For example, think about the overwhelming task of trying to find all digital information a company has stored about a specific customer. How much time would it take to perform this, theoretically, simple task? How many people in the organisation would it take to find every email, contract, invoice, instant message, presentation, spreadsheet and document? Ultimately, it would require access to dozens of disparate, highly specific business applications to find the information. This situation is extremely inefficient, expensive and unnecessary.

The main reason for this complexity is that the fundamental structure of the information systems within companies is application-centric. Each department within a company operates in terms of specific business tasks for which they need even more specific software applications. Each application stores and accesses information in its own, proprietary way. This results in a highly fragmented landscape of isolated silos of content that are only accessible by very specific applications. There is very little – if any - abstraction between content and the business application.

In comparison, think about how information access works on the web. Open a web browser and use any popular search engine, such as Google, to look for a specific topic. Within a fraction of a second there is access to vast amounts of information – without the need to have any knowledge of the location or system where this information resides.

This is because the web is fundamentally information-centric. The applications used to access information are completely abstracted from the content itself. A simple browser is all that is needed to access the largest information system that mankind has ever created. This is one of the essential reasons for the enormous success of the web, and the reason that there is now a structure and a standard (JSR 170) that enables business users to interact with business content in the same straightforward, efficient and effortless way.

CXO. The amount and complexity of data in business today can be incredibly daunting – despite the benefits, many companies would be put off even tackling the topic. How would you persuade them otherwise?

SP. It is true that today we are at a technology evolutionary break point. Today’s enterprise IT architecture has not been built to deal with today’s challenges. As a result of this mismatch, the enterprise is faced with inefficiencies, exploding complexity and ever-increasing costs. The inefficiencies of the application-centric blueprint are becoming intolerable for today’s information driven economy and companies.

However, the undeniable benefits of the alternative blueprint, the information-centric architecture, has proven its absolute superiority through the unparalleled success of the web. By leveraging information-centric architectures, content repository technology will enable companies to substantially reduce the complexity and cost of their information systems while making valuable content accessible throughout the enterprise and beyond, ultimately, bringing the ease of use that we have come to expect from the web to the enterprise.

CXO. What are the long-term implications – is it a case of once implemented you see instant results or does it pay off little by little?

SP. Consolidating proprietary content solutions will have both immediate positive impacts and will lay the foundation for a fundamental long-term change. With a standardised approach, content repository technology holds the greatest promise for eliminating the information silos created by application-specific storage mechanisms and proprietary APIs.

In order to develop a good long-term strategy, organisations should start with an analysis of the existing environment by asking the following questions: How many different repositories does my company own? What is the total cost of ownership? How many of these repositories can be consolidated into a standards-based content repository, and what are the related cost savings? What is the best migration strategy to achieve these savings?

Based on this knowledge, the near-term strategy would be to make sure that the company does not buy or build any new applications that are not ready for the new standard for enterprise content (JSR 170). This will prevent a company from making investments in applications that are not future-proof and will need to be replaced or migrated in the future with substantial cost.

CXO. What’s next for this – do you see a growing demand for these kinds of solutions and is it developing further?

SP. The pent up demand for this type of solution is extensive and far-reaching. This industry-wide standard (JSR 170) will become to enterprise content repositories what SQL is to relational databases. Think about how the SQL standard radically changed this industry. Within a very short time no one bought proprietary databases anymore and a lot of vendors disappeared. With the SQL standard it became possible to build true database infrastructure.

The same will happen to the market of enterprise content systems. Standardised content repositories will become the new infrastructure technology for all unstructured content. On top of this new infrastructure a whole new generation of applications will be developed. This goes far beyond ECM and will change the way we interact with any kind of information.

Large blue-chip companies looking for ways to simplify and consolidate their repository infrastructure have begun aggressively adopting this technology as a key infrastructural component of their IT infrastructure. They understand that this strategy has very substantial benefits, including a massive potential to save IT-cost, deliver a solid ROI, and ultimately a very low TCO.