Enterprise content management (ECM) means many things to many people, but nearly everyone we speak to agrees on at least three of its best attributes: it is a worthy goal, it is a potential driver of business value, and it is an enviable technical achievement.

But one question on which the market seems divided is whether – the first letter of the acronym notwithstanding – ECM is truly saleable as an enterprise solution. A recently-completed Kinetic Information market inquiry suggests that it isn’t, at least not in the present economic climate.

Instead, we find that one of most critical sales challenges facing ECM vendors today – especially those that “bulked up” over the past two years in order to pursue enterprise-scale opportunities – is how to slim themselves down in order to best meet customer needs on a departmental basis. Conversely, vendors with solid departmental traction are now seeking ways to push further into the enterprise as a whole, and at the moment, they are finding the going rather slow.

“Stuck in the Middle with You”
For one thing, CIOs and CFOs are all but paralyzed by slack business and spending restrictions, and have been slow to sign off on ECM projects. In this tightfisted corporate atmosphere, the word “content” still has a squishy sound, and “enterprise” revives painful memories of the massive infrastructure investments they made a few years back whose payoff still seems elusive. Changing this perception requires a pretty compelling set of value proof-points and an assist from the economy as a whole – and the longer the latter takes to materialize, the more important it is that the former become reality.

At the other end of the sales pipeline, the people who are best able to appreciate content management’s day-to-day benefits are the ultimate end users, who may notice fairly immediate improvement in the way they are able to work. But end users don’t set the corporate budget and generally don’t have the ear of the senior executives who do. So it is clear that conventional viral marketing from the desktop up just may not pay, and that other stratagems need to be employed.

Crossing the Enterprise Divide
Given all this, we recommend a “back to basics” strategy that emphasizes tangible return on the departmental level, and encourages dialog across departments and with IT so a groundswell of support can be built and capture a CxO’s attention. Here are a few issues to keep in mind when executing on such a strategy:

• Department heads need to monitor and control. This is not a matter of being on a power trip: rather, managers must justify any and all expenditures of time and cash, and defend – hopefully while promoting – their departments’ performance on a daily basis. It isn’t enough to know where in the content workflow a process has been interrupted; managers should be able to tell immediately how the interruption will affect customer service, time to market, and other relevant business outcomes. The nascent market for business activity monitoring (BAM) is centered on this capability. Even enterprise Goliath IBM is playing to this need with its new DB2 Cube Views, software that automates OLAP processing and lets users manipulate multi-dimensional charts to perform chores like sales performance monitoring and forecasting.

• Department heads need solutions that tackle their business-critical issues. Whether one is selling more of a horizontal content application (e.g., Documentum, FileNET) or is focusing more on a targeted set of content management capabilities (e.g., Open Text), it is crucial to encapsulate those business processes that most directly:

1. affect either sales revenue (customer service), operational cost (employee productivity/system throughput), or both;
2. involve risk to the company (regulatory compliance), and
3. consume the most human resources (claims handling, order processing)

• Consider buying vs. building additional domain expertise and technical functionality. If content-related technologies are becoming commodities (which they are), and if closing departmental sales is an urgent task (which it is), vendors ought to look for ways to buy rather than build domain expertise and extra functionality. This might involve hiring experts or acquiring companies, or partnering intelligently with complementary vendors or selected systems integrators and/or value-added resellers. But either way, it is a proven way to increase your market agility and shorten certain sales cycles.

• Imbue your pre-sales messages with “business,” not “coolness.” At a recent HP briefing on management systems, one analyst remarked: “You guys have always been good at selling to Dilbert, but not so good at selling to Dilbert’s boss.”  The point, of course, is that department heads – even pointy-haired ones – don’t buy technology; they buy business solutions that allow them to do more with less. And they focus more on the solutions aspect today than they have in years.

The primary reason this is so is that smaller organizations think more like ‘big departments’ than like large corporate entities, and enterprise application providers are now learning to adjust their pitches accordingly. Where it promises to get most interesting is where they cross paths with the ECM vendors pushing upward – and the battle then likely will be fought in terms of focused functionality, supplier reliability, and system interoperability.

Conclusion: Think Globally, Act Locally
None of the pragmatic salesmanship outlined above makes the visionary thinking behind enterprise content management any less valid. Organizations – particularly those in financial services, manufacturing, health care, and government – would benefit dramatically from integrating all their paper, e-document, and Web content. And standardizing both the user experience and the system administration is essential to maximizing the total value of a content management solution, especially as the volume of the content to be managed continues to expand and as the format of that content increasingly encompass voice as well.

All indicators today suggest that the best course of action is to take a page from the environmental movement and to “think globally, act locally” – for sure, senior managers are looking to improve the performance of their entire enterprise, but it is going to take a lot of departmental prodding before they spring into action. Contact Us for More

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