Web 2.0 meets enterprise content management

By IDC’s Melissa Webster

By now, most large organisations have begun to think seriously about how they'll incorporate Web 2.0 tools and technologies into their IT stacks. The enormous popularity of social media and social networking on the consumer web is driving these tools into the enterprise – like it or not.

In fact, reactions have been mixed. On the one hand, organisations have struggled with user adoption and training issues for years. Here at last are tools and technologies that users proactively seek out and learn on their own. Web 2.0 tools bring a lot of value to collaboration and knowledge management, and can help boost information worker productivity. Employee blogs, wikis, microblogging, and, increasingly, employee-generated video are all on the rise. Indeed, many companies tell us they find they need to have a Web 2.0 strategy to attract younger workers.

Risks
On the other hand, organisations have to worry about risk, including the risk that company proprietary information or internal discussions could find their way onto the public Internet. From a compliance and litigation preparedness perspective, everything is discoverable and anything can be a record – whether it's a document, an email, an IM or a tweet.

Doing nothing just isn't an option. As IDC research shows, in the absence of IT-supported tools, employees will resort to the free consumer Web 2.0 tools they already know and love. The challenge is to leverage the power of Web 2.0 in a ‘safe’ way – in the context of the organisation's policies and procedures, and its information governance strategy.

This is where enterprise content management (ECM) systems have an important role to play. Content management systems arose out of the need to securely store, manage, and version documents and document fragments (or, in the case of web content management systems, pages and components of pages) along with their metadata. They have evolved to manage images and rich media such as video and audio. They provide a robust repository for content, along with records management facilities that enable the organisation to manage the lifecycle of all kinds of content in accordance with government- and board-mandated regulations.

ECM systems need to evolve to support the new kinds of content that Web 2.0 technologies create, and the authoring interfaces they provide, along with the new kinds of metadata these solutions generate. They need to support wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, microblog tweets and so forth, and capture and make use of the metadata generated by things like social tagging, content rating, and social networks that enable new ways to search for information and identify experts. Not surprisingly, this is an area in which content management vendors of all stripes are aggressively investing today, either through their own R&D or via acquisition, and the leaders are already shipping products that incorporate some of these capabilities.

Disconnect and overlap
It may be a while before the dust settles, however. There are still many areas of disconnect and also overlap between document collaboration systems and enterprise content management systems, and the content lifecycle is not a simple linear process. In some cases, the content management system manages the lifecycle of the content from authoring to publishing, but in other cases, the content is created and managed in team sites, and migrated later on to a content management system (and ultimately, an archive) once it has been approved, or published.

Web 2.0 technologies need to be integrated with both collaboration and content management solutions, and ultimately, the effectiveness of these integrations will rely in part on improving the integration between the collaboration and content management systems themselves. This is another dimension that ECM vendors understand very well, with most offering collaboration solutions today. Customers should ask their ECM suppliers for their guidance around the best practices for leveraging Web 2.0 in the context of content management and collaboration, and evaluate their longer term vision and product roadmap.

Melissa Webster is Program Vice President for Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC.