The Gilbane Report: Volume 8, Number 8

What is Content Management?

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"Content management" has emerged as a term now found in most IT strategies, ensuring its place in RFPs, vendor literature, and analyst forecasts. This circular chain reaction guarantees its continued popularity for at least a couple of years. We think it has even longer legs. Its meaning may be vague and it may be overused, but unlike most buzz-terms we think it will remain useful even though its meaning, or use, will doubtless change. In spite of its rising popularity, there is no question we hear as often as "What is content management?" People may not know what it means, but they sure know that it is mainstream.

The interest in content management arose as businesses moved from simple low-volume to complex high-volume web publishing, whether e-catalogs or portals. Today, content management looks more like the messy result of web publishing meets enterprise e-business. The integration, scale, and velocity requirements of e-commerce mean content management has to keep up with transaction management. It also means there are a lot more ways you have to process and reuse different types of content. All this means more products to do all the "managing".

This month we look at various views of content management and describe it's evolution, it's use, and why we think it is a useful term that has staying power. Our objective is to help you understand enough to know how vendors and consultants are using the term, and to help you think about which technologies are relevant to your business needs. In future issues we'll explore individual segments of the content management market.

What is Content Management?

"Content management" as used in IT circles is a relatively recent term that has emerged coincident with the web. It is used in many ways to refer to many different things. "Content management" is used to describe everything from Microsoft's Front Page to Interwoven's TeamSite to Akamai's EdgeAdvantage, and those are just a small sampling of products where, at first glance, it seems like an accurate moniker. Content management is a term that causes intelligent users and vendors to scratch their heads. As we mention in the introduction, "What is Content Management?" is easily the question we are asked more than any other (even more often than we are asked about XML), and most of the time it is vendors asking. Users usually have a concept of content management - they know what they mean and what they want, and mostly don't care what vendors and consultants think it means as long as they can get their problem solved. Vendors have a much bigger stake. They need to know that if they market a content management solution, it will be recognized as such by a critical mass of potential customers. Consultants... well, we all know about consultants.

Content management is not only "in"; it is expected to be big. Analysts forecast a large market. The META Group predicts that the content management market will grow from $800 million in 1999 to $10 billion in 2004. Gartner believes that "leading-edge enterprises in all industries" will have formal content management strategies in place by 2003. Forrester sees big spending starting this year. We'll talk more about how the analysts define this market, i.e., what they are measuring, below.

Everyone needs to manage content, but the similarity ends there. Our goal in this issue is simple to state: to help you understand the different ways "content management" is being used today so you can be comfortable discussing your needs with vendors and consultants, formulate your own opinion with confidence, and synchronize your expectations of content management solutions with your business needs.

"Content" & "Management"

Dictionaries don't provide any insight to our question. The definitions are broad enough to cover pretty much any kind of processing of any kind of information. We can, and will, limit our discussion to digital content, but that doesn't narrow down the field very much. That's OK. In fact we think a broad interpretation of content fills a horrendous gap in IT vocabulary and will significantly simplify, as well as enhance, discourse.

Years ago, we used "information management" to try to transcend the bifurcation of applications into data management applications (which IT groups cared about) and document management applications (not usually deemed worthy of attention by real IT professionals). While "information" was inclusive enough, the applications were so un-integrated that "information management" had nothing concrete to refer to, was not very useful in understanding the landscape, and not surprisingly, never caught on. Today's web applications require the integration of structured data and unstructured text, but also audio, streaming video, executable code, transaction-related information, etc. We need a term to describe what these data types have in common, and "content" seems to work just fine.

"Management" is an even fuzzier term - albeit one we have dealt with before. When we were trying to help companies makes sense of the document management market a few years ago there was a similar situation, i.e., where doing anything to a document, except perhaps reading it, was considered managing it by someone. As a result there was only a very slight chance that any more than a half dozen of the hundreds of "document management" products on the market would actually be appropriate for your specific application. With document management we classified true management systems as only those with check-in/check-out functionality. This was perhaps arbitrary, but very helpful in terms of helping companies avoid, for example, wasting time looking at a search engine product when they really needed a collaborative authoring tool.

Certainly check-in/check-out capability remains critical for many content management applications, however, the world is a little more complicated now. First, there are even more things to do to content that might be, and are, considered "managing" (authoring, acquiring, publishing, dynamic page generation, integrating, assembling, versioning, configuring, linking, delivering, caching, analyzing, sharing, searching, categorizing, transforming, re-using, syndicating, archiving, etc.). Second, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of repositories required for many applications due to the increase in content types and to enterprise integration requirements.

Analyzing definitions only gets us part way towards making sense of content management. What we really need to understand is how the term is actually used.

How"Content Management" has Evolved

It would be nice to think that the industry realized we needed a useable term that didn't discriminate between content types and chose "content" to fill the gap we described above. But of course that isn't what happened. Instead there continues to be a slow evolution of what we understand content management to be.

Web content management

We don't know of anyone who can be credited with the first use of "content management", but there is little doubt that it was Vignette who was the most responsible for the term becoming widely associated with web content management. This in spite of the fact that there were far more people "managing web content" using Microsoft and Lotus technology at a time when you could still count Vignette's customers on one hand. Content management is still associated with web publishing more than any other application. It is largely because web publishing is so different from other types of publishing that content management has come to encompass such a wide variety of functions.

Now that businesses are starting to integrate traditional commerce and publishing processes with e-commerce and web publishing, we will see "web content management" used to refer to a much broader set of applications.

Document, knowledge & content management

The explosion of web pages should have been a gold mine for document management vendors as businesses became overwhelmed. There they were with most of the functionality already in place and installed customer bases. Some of them even had early support for link management, page caching, and packages of templates and subscription services for what have come to be known as corporate portals. Unfortunately, few customers cared. Documents, and technology for working with them, were considered irrelevant, or uninteresting at best, by web developers. There remains however, a lot of commonality in the requirements of the two types of systems. And there are a lot of features in document management systems that should be more prevalent in content management offerings. Some document management vendors have successfully morphed into content management vendors, and some content management vendors can now do more than assemble web pages.

Fortunately, the assault on logic and language that was knowledge management has run out of steam. We'll still see the term used by consultants and some technology vendors (including Microsoft and Lotus), but we won't have listen to specious marketing pitches claiming that managing knowledge will replace managing data, documents, content, etc.

Content management has overpowered both document and knowledge management as a mainstream concept.

Digital assets

Many of the capabilities that are missing in web content management systems are available in digital asset management systems (Bulldog, Artesia, Informix, etc.). Like many document management systems have done, digital asset management systems focus more on general-purpose management than on assembly and delivery. This is why partnerships like the one between Vignette and Artesia make sense.

As content management systems continue to add capabilities beyond those targeted at web publishing there is likely to be increased overlap. It is also possible that "digital assets" could emerge to rival "content" as the preferred term for digital information, either in general, or for certain applications. We'll just have to wait and see which way our fickleness takes us. "Digital assets" doesn't have the appeal "content" has, but it does have the credibility and is a logical alternative.

Code & content

When Java first burst on the scene there was a lot of talk about the integration of content and code. There were those who thought the distinction between content and code would disappear. There were even products and proposed content delivery standards promoting approaches that assumed content and code were inseparable. But is it better to keep content and code separate so that content can be processed by multiple applications? Or, to incorporate code into content so that it is self-contained and "self-processable" in appropriate environments? There is a real philosophical issue here that is more complex than our questions may imply.

There is a difference between integrating content and code and integrating the management of content and code. While the former is often questionable, the latter is likely a very worthwhile endeavor. Source code control systems and document management systems have historically had very close feature sets. Given the necessary velocity required for managing the integrated content and code of today's web applications, using the same technology for managing both can ease complexity. Rational's incorporation of content management technology in its products is recognition of this.

E-commerce

Clearly "content" is, in fact, used to cover a broad range of digital information. Perhaps transaction data (without unstructured supporting content) and other "pure" structured data tables are the only types of information that are excluded from most people's concept of content management. However, even this pure data can end up in a content management repository when integrated with other content. E-commerce continues to be the single most powerful cause of what kinds of content need to be managed as well as what kinds of systems content management applications need to integrate with.

Because of e-commerce, personalization, syndication, digital rights management, catalog searching, product configuration, and other applications are increasingly being tied into content management. Any one of these could be a stand-alone application or a built-in function of a content management system. Also because of e-commerce, content management is being integrated with ERP, data analysis, and other back-end enterprise and business partner systems.

The first web sites had content without transactions ("brochureware"), and the second wave of web sites focused on adding commerce transactions. B2C and B2B strategists now clearly recognize that differentiation and value comes from content that surrounds and supports transactions.

Analyst Views

Analyst views are always to be taken with a grain of salt, as they are typically the result of an individual analyst or two that is then influenced by the firm's marketing needs. Sometimes this has to do with who the firm's clients are, and sometimes with internal organizational issues, e.g., which group "owns" the topic. Nonetheless, these are smart people trying to makes sense of things; they are influential; and they have reasonable things to say. Comparing multiple analyst views is the best way to get a quick fix on the characteristics of a particular market. Not all the analyst firms have a focus on content management, but they all have an opinion. We have picked just a few we think are worth mentioning. (There are others we would have included given time and space.).

Gartner

Gartner identifies four categories of content management solutions depending on what type of content they are designed to manage:

• Enterprise internal content. This would include corporate portal, document management, media asset management, retrieval, software configuration management, and product data management products.
• Web site content. Including web publishing and document management products.
• E-business transactional content. Including mainly commerce server products.
• Shared content. Including business partner and supply chain collaborative content that isn't transactional.

Gartner also talks about something they call the "virtual repository" which integrates, logically or physically, four different types of existing content repositories. These are: traditional document management, web content management, digital asset management, and document component (e.g., SGML/XML) management. This implies a view of content management that incorporates all of the content types and features associated with these four repository solutions. They don't believe such a solution exists yet and suggest, as other analysts do, that multiple solutions are necessary.

Gartner recommends basing your content management strategy around a "content management life cycle". By analyzing the flow of content, together with its use, you can determine what kinds of content management repositories make sense and how they should be integrated.

Forrester

Forrester was one of the first of the major market research firms to target the Internet and web applications, particularly for e-commerce. Their concept of "transactive content" has been influential in helping drive home the critical role of content in commerce. There is now quite a collection of terms used by other analysts that are similar (processable content, dynamic content, active content, actionable content, transactional content, etc.).

They have not had a specific focus on content management. But that is not because they don't see it as important. They consider content management to be a critical component of an e-business infrastructure.

Giga

Giga also considers the content management market as consisting of four categories of solutions:

• Software configuration management (e.g. MKS)
• Document management (e.g. Documentum)
• Web publishing (e.g. EBT), and
• E-commerce servers (e.g. Blue Martini).

They make the point that none of these types of systems will meet everyone's content management requirements and so will often need to be combined.

They also argue that e-commerce requirements will ensure that content management and e-commerce servers become increasingly integrated. This integration will include personalization and analysis features.

Meta Group

Meta defines content management as "... a complex blend of functionality, including the acquisition, management, assembly, review and approval, effective publishing, retention and security of information bound for any of an organization's ... Internet, intranet, or extranet venues." (1.) Notice that even though they limit their definition to Internet channels they are still able to come up with a $10 billion dollar market by 2004.

CAP Ventures

CAP Ventures' current view is that content management is an "umbrella" that includes numerous technologies including, but not limited to:

• "Web Publishing: Tools used to create, manage and deliver content to the web, including digital asset management systems.
• Collaboration: Tools used to assist content-driven creation and communication processes, including document management systems.
• Portals: Tools that provide a window to a wide range of information, from company documents and data to external resources and publications.
• Content Enrichment: Tools that help refine the selection of content for delivery or viewing, including taxonomy, categorization, personalization engines, and analytical tools, etc.
• Content Distribution: Tools involved in managing content outside the direct control of the dynamic content technology system, including syndication servers and digital rights management systems."

What the analysts have in common

They all have an inclusive view of content. They all include virtually all unstructured content types and, (we think) would include structured data that is integrated with the unstructured content. They also all have some concept of transactional content that is either associated with a financial transaction or a business process although they may differ on the definition and where or how this type of content is managed. In fact, analysts within the same firm may have slightly different perspectives depending on whether they are covering B2C or B2B markets.

They all see content as increasingly important for commerce applications. One result is that analysts are all bullish on the market for content management software even though they may define it differently and may not have actually measured it yet.

In general, the common threads are more important than the differences. One important difference however, is that some include content management solutions for non-internet channels and some don't.

Conclusions

We have learned over the years that it is not always useful to force-fit products and applications into neat categories. The process of trying to fit products into categories is always educational and helps reduce confusion, but product marketing is not a slave to logic or science so most organizational efforts are doomed from the start. And let's face it; you know your business problems are not exactly like everyone else's, even those of your direct competitors. We need to deal with the fuzzy boundaries of our own business needs along with the fuzzy boundaries of analyst market, and vendor product, descriptions.

Another reason not to get too hung-up on precise market categories, especially if you are a vendor, is that the sometimes-subtle differences category concepts are based on don't always translate well. A third of our readers are non-native English speakers and we know, for example, that both "content management" and (especially) "knowledge management" have totally bewildered many of them. And it is not because they don't understand English.

We think the broad view of most of the analyst firms is appropriate, at least for now. We are sure that a number of subdivisions of the content management market will emerge as businesses re-organize their processes and workflows to reflect the incorporation of e-business requirements. Vendors will also be choosing different business processes to target and will therefore be adding different types of features. The landscape will look very different soon, and we'll be watching. In the meantime, any of the various approaches proposed by the analysts we've mentioned can provide some help.

Today, there is not a single, well-defined content management application that has the usual 3-6 major vendors associated with it. Rather there are dozens of applications that have something to do with managing content that often have considerable overlap in functionality. Many solutions will involve multiple products that can reasonably be described as providing content management capability. For example, you might have a content management system that focuses on collaborative authoring, feeding into a content management system that integrates authored descriptions with product data, that in turn feeds into a content management system that assembles and personalizes content for the web. So far we have three "content management" systems that all use metadata and have some level of version control. It would be easy to expand this into a dizzying scenario involving a half dozen or more content management solutions.

You can expect vendors to jump into the fray as Vignette has just done with their Extended Content Management (XCM) initiative. They want to take control of the confusion over "content management" and use it. While their view is obviously going to have their products at the center, understanding their framework could be useful. And it may be that an analyst or two adopts it.

Last year (volume 7, number 6) we described a "spectrum" of repository applications with the more "commerce-oriented" (e.g., e-catalogs) at one end and "content-oriented" (e.g., business intelligence portal) at the other. We described characteristics differentiating applications based on where they appeared in the spectrum. You need to decide which specific challenge(s) you want to address. You may just have a notion you want to "manage content", but you need to be much more specific. Target publishing an e-catalog, or managing policy manuals, or translating marketing literature, or assembling personalized portal web pages, or archiving transactive content, or building a foundation for syndicating, and so on.

Content management is sometimes considered a platform for other business needs such as personalization, syndication, portals, etc. Interwoven, for example, positions their solution this way. Some e-commerce platform vendors, such as Blue Martini, on the other hand, position content management as a component of their platform. Other vendors are targeting specific vertical applications. A key question for you is how tied your needs are to a specific application versus multi-application infrastructure support. Increasingly, content management is seen as a general enterprise-wide functional requirement with layered specific content management applications integrated as needed.

The content management market will continue to be driven by e-commerce, with non-commerce applications benefiting from the result of all the development. For example, corporate portal applications will get more and better personalization functionality, and sooner, because of its importance to e-commerce efforts.

The content management market will be dynamic for some time. While there are solutions priced from more or less free to hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are still large solution/price point gaps, especially in the mid-range. Expect to see a large number of companies entering the market in the next year with lower prices and enhanced functionality. As in other software markets, first generation high-end solutions will remain in demand for complex large-scale applications, but as the market matures, feature-rich, lower cost, 80% packaged solutions will start to take big chunks of market share. Many of the tools we have for single source content management, publishing, organization, internationalization, retrieval, and navigation will seem primitive when compared with some of the next generation solutions.

--Frank Gilbane

1 From "The Content Supply Chain", David Yockelson, The Meta Group.