March 2010

The nature of how business is conducted and organizations function is rapidly evolving, as a result of fundamental changes in demographic, technological, and economic realities. Workers are increasingly Web savvy; they use and like consumer Web 2.0 collaboration applications on the public Internet and are expecting and demanding similar software user experiences in the enterprise. Enterprises themselves are changing. Organizations are more networked, internally and with other entities, as a result of improvements in computing networks, globalization, and an increasingly mobile workforce. Economic forces are also reshaping the way organizations are structured and operate, including the IT function. IT department budgets have shrunk during the current recession, forcing IT staff to tackle an ever-growing list of computing requirements and projects with fewer human resources. At the same time, the Total Cost of Ownership for enterprise-hosted applications has become increasingly prohibitive relative to the lower cost utility computing model offered by cloud computing providers.

These macro-level changes have profound implications for the applications and systems that organizations use to share content internally and with others. Individuals have become more resistant to complicated, traditional content management systems that restrict their ability to collaboratively create, edit, and share valuable content within the organization. Furthermore, corporate firewalls and traditional enterprise content management systems impede the flow of that content as individuals within organizations attempt to collaborate with external partners, suppliers, and customers. Lastly, IT departments don’t have the human or monetary resources necessary to quickly and cost-effectively develop new solutions that enable their internal and external customers to collaborate on and around content.

These challenges are driving organizations and their workers to think differently and to seek new content management strategies and solutions that complement existing content management systems. Continuing to manage and share content solely according to traditional practice is not a viable option. One promising approach is Cloud Content Management.

This Gilbane Group Beacon examines how large-scale trends are changing enterprise collaboration and content sharing requirements and expectations. It defines Cloud Content Management, an emerging set of content management practices and a category of software that supports those practices. Lastly, it demonstrates how Cloud Content Management is a value-adding complement to Enterprise Content Management today and has the potential to expand its ability to control the sharing of content more tightly in the future.

Sponsored by Box.net. This report is available at no charge. To download it, login, or register.

February 2010

Public access to our government information is a logical step for governments at all levels, considering that it was created by our public institutions. There are, however, many challenges that severely limit what is actually easily accessible. Government agencies and departments produce very large volumes of information in a wide variety of formats and structures. For years, the public has had access to only the tip of the data iceberg. Much of this information is locked in information silos and in proprietary or hard-to-access formats. A myriad of data structures, document types, storage formats and repositories, and even budgetary and personnel limitations have made it difficult for agencies to make the data available in robust, reusable forms.

The Obama administration recognized this problem and has released a directive describing the official policy for Transparency and Open Government that mandates an unprecedented level of accessibility to government information. The time has come for a rapid and profound improvement in open data via information sharing initiatives, for government, or any institution or enterprise. Delivering on the promise of open government will require improving the availability of large volume, diverse government data in robust, reusable form. A number of obstacles have historically limited these kinds of initiatives – or worse, simply put them out of the realm of possibility.

This paper identifies the obstacles facing developers of applications involving large-scale, heterogeneous data systems. It illustrates how they are being addressed with new technologies, standards, and approaches, and shows how they deliver value to governments and the citizens they serve within the context of two case studies.

December, 2009

The deployment of multiple content management (CM) systems within a single organization is no longer a business trend, but a business fact. Executives want to make decisions based on strategic goals and objectives, not on whether systems can be integrated with reasonable effort. Business buyers of CM want to be able to embrace integration so they can implement best-of-breed, purpose-built systems for specialized applications like digital marketing and electronic discovery. They need systems that connect externally as well as internally, supporting relationships throughout their value chain.

The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification is a market-driven response to CM integration challenges. CMIS is being developed under the auspices of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) by an OASIS Technical Committee. CMIS specifies a standardized content management repository access method, providing a powerful, consistent way of connecting CM systems. It is designed to reduce integration complexity and the development time and costs required to provide interoperability between disparate systems. With CMIS, creating integrated content ecosystems with two or more repositories will be easier, cheaper, and faster. This paper describes the CMIS specification itself, the business and technical drivers behind its creation, and the benefits organizations can expect to see with its deployment. This report is available at no charge. To download it, login, or register.

November, 2009

Gilbane believes that digital marketing managers can learn a great deal about leveraging content assets by drawing on the experiences of other content-rich organizations. One of the best candidate industries for lessons learned is the publishing industry. Challenges faced by CMOs and publishers are very similar: content closely tied to revenue streams, large volumes of diverse content types, rapidly evolving expectations regarding personalized content and interactivity, and requirement for frictionless publishing in order to meet the need for content immediacy.

In this paper, we share insights that will help digital marketers think like publishers. We draw on several examples that show how leading publishers have addressed knotty problems at the core of their businesses. We describe the content technologies that are central to their solutions, and we show how these tools and technologies can be deployed within digital marketing environments to achieve business results. Our goal is to help marketers develop a new perspective on their challenges, one informed by successes in another industry. This report is available at no charge. To download it, login, or register.

June, 2009

Over the past decade, DIA has invested heavily in XML to drive interoperability standards for defining, managing, and publishing community-accessible content. Mandated in 2002 as Intelligence Community Metadata System for Publications (IC-MSP), required to be in use by 2003, and most recently specified as Implementation Profile for Intelligence Publications (XML Encoding) (PUBS-XML),4 DIA defines the XML schemas and data dictionaries for the major types of documents produced within the intelligence community. Furthermore, the Intelligence Community Standard for Publication Metadata (ICS PUBS) relies on PUBS-XML to describe the structural components of documents and provides the foundations for “the successful implementation of a wide range of advanced automated tools that will help find, organize, analyze, and manage information products.”

With the adoption of content management technologies that leverage XML, it is now possible for stakeholders to develop and deploy interoperable systems. But XML as the underlying tagging standard is only the means to an end - the overall DIA objective of ensuring interoperability and community-wide information sharing, including the mandate for stakeholders to submit reports to the Library of National Intelligence (LNI). This report is available at no charge. To download it, login, or register.

January, 2009

Imagine that your company is not impacted by the economic issues that define the global business climate in 2009.

No spending freezes, no budget cuts, no staff reductions. No standing still amid uncertain and unpredictable external business factors. Upgrades and enhancements to critical business applications go ahead as planned. New web strategies for delivering content, increasing revenues, and satisfying customers are executed as top priorities, following executive mandate.

Now imagine that you can still move ahead with your web business programs, in spite of uncertainty. What would you gain by acting when others wait for recovery? What would that mean to your organization when the economy shifts around again?

This paper will help you understand how SaaS WCM fits into a strategy for making investments that create competitive advantage, even in unpredictable economies. . This report is available at no charge. Download it.

October, 2008

The Gilbane Group and JustSystems are working together to crystallize the business benefits of structured content - documents that have been chunked into meaningful component parts and tagged in a systematic fashion. As industry analysts and software developers, our joint efforts are based on a simple assumption. We believe that tagging business documents by relevant components and managing the resulting chunks (sometimes termed content components) in a systematic manner will transform, and perhaps revolutionize, how companies use information to meet business objectives. Structured content promises many business benefits for content intelligence and content reuse.

JustSystems has developed, with support from Gilbane Group, the ROI Blueprint for Structured Content. The ROI Blueprint is a tool for analyzing the business value of structured content. We anticipate that content professionals, information architects, and systems designers will use this blueprint as a guide to examine how heretofore "unstructured" documents affect current activities and business processes. This report is available at no charge. Download it.

November, 2008

Companies create competitive advantage with technology by building on current practice in ways that others in their industries have yet to discover or implement. They pursue and establish leadership positions by extending existing knowledge into new domains and experimenting with established principles. The rewards for success can be significant, not only in terms of revenues, operational costs or other business measures, but also in terms of new skills, knowledge and expertise that create true competitive advantage and open doors to innovation.

Emerging applications for structured content have the potential to deliver this kind of value to organizations willing to go beyond current practice. Structured content can support a wide range of business activities, from the classic and well understood uses (in areas such as technical documentation) to emerging applications that enable organizations to become leaders in their field. If you already use structured content within your organization, you may be looking for opportunities to advance your current practices to create new value. Which applications are emerging as the next wave of XML adoption? How do they relate to your current implementations and initiatives? Once identified, how can you sell them to management?

In this paper, we look at real examples drawn from companies who are taking a leadership role in defining new approaches and implementing transformational applications of structured content. These examples will illustrate the positive impact on revenue growth, cost reductions, and risk mitigation. The foundation for the discussion is the "Leadership" view of the ROI Blueprint for Structured Content. This report is available at no charge. Download it.

November, 2008

The Gilbane Group and JustSystems are working together to crystallize the business benefits of structured content – documents that have been chunked into meaningful component parts and tagged in a systematic fashion. In this report, we will consider how structured content can be used to foster innovation of business operations and processes, and thus drive promising and profitable business opportunities.

What is structured content for innovation? We believe that you need to focus on business results. To our way of thinking, structured content for innovation enables an organization to do what has not been possible without structure, and without the processes that structured content enables. Innovation brings fundamentally new capabilities to an organization. Innovation derives not just from how structured content is used, but also from where it is used. This report is available at no charge. Download it.