John Aylward's Blog

Managing structured data is so easy nowadays.  Construct an Oracle
database, populate it and query it.  A piece of cake!  Even if the data
is in another database all you need to do is to connect to it and run a
query.  So all your business problems are solved if all your
information is in the form of structured data!  But, wait a minute,
what about all those invoices, letters, emails, contracts ...?  Oh,
that's OK they are on the file system ... somewhere ... and in my Inbox
... or someone else's ... and in my filing cabinet ... but I can't
search them there.  Hmmm!  Maybe I do have a problem with my
unstructured data.

The answer is Enterprise Content Management
(ECM).  I can store all my documents in one repository and search for
anything I want.  Case closed then!  Well, not quite.  How come I
always get hundreds of results back when I do a search, when all I want
to find is just the invoices for ACME Corp?  OK, so I need to add
metadata ... my ECM system lets me do that.  Cool!  Now I can sort my
documents into places where I can find them.  But, it's a real pain
having to leave my Financials system and open a new system to do a
query to find the documents.  Can't I link them together .....?

Welcome to the world of ECM solutions!

The
ECM market has matured in the last few years to the extent that there
are many vendors with ECM systems that allow you to store documents,
categorise them and then retrieve them.  Smaller companies with
software offering extra bits of ECM functionality have been acquired
and now larger ECM companies are themselves being acquired.  So,
several companies have all the functionality you could possibly need,
but do all the component parts fully integrate?  Are they scalable? 
Are they efficient to deploy?  Can you integrate easily with other
business systems?

The answer to all these questions is usually
"yes!" - if you look at the marketing material.  But what about
actually deploying the software?  I think you will find all sorts of
scare stories.  Of course you can have anything you want ... if you pay
for it!  So, we need easily deployable ECM solutions that integrate
with business processes and systems without costing the earth.  That's
where I come in!  I will explore potential solutions in future blogs. 
Watch this space!