InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
February 14, 2000
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Tools help automate the collection, assembly, and management of elements on a Web site
By Alan Radding
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hen Fisher Controls International Inc. went live with its first intranet in 1996, it generated about 1,000 hits a month from employees accessing a mere handful of documents contributed by eight departments. Content management wasn't even a consideration.By 1998, the site contained about 150,000 pages of frequently changing information on a main server plus more information on nine connected servers. Today, 80 departments regularly contribute production information that attracts 1.5 million hits a month. The site is central to the company and is instrumental in reducing the amount of money spent on printed documents. Under such situations, content management became a necessity.
Mark Heindselman, manager of knowledge network and information services, says, "We needed to organize the chaos."
When it comes to Web-site management, Web developers and managers typically focus on performance and availability. When online brokerage E-Trade Group Inc.'s site is slow, customers howl. When competitor Charles Schwab & Co.'s site goes down, it makes national headlines. Web content management-the process of collecting, publishing, and removing content from a Web site-has taken a back seat to Web-site performance management. But as the content available on sites increases in volume, complexity, and timeliness, and the number of contributors multiplies, the need for and importance of content management becomes increasingly, even painfully, obvious.
And it's not just about the Web. For many companies, such as Fisher Controls, intranets are driving the need for content management. Corporate intranets-deployed in more than 90% of major companies, according to consulting firm Meta Group-and extranets have unexpectedly turned a wide range of employees, departments, and even partners into content providers. Web-bound or not, companies suddenly find themselves caught up in the complicated business of publishing highly dynamic multimedia content that combines text, data, images, and even streaming media.
Faced with the increasingly unwieldy task of managing rapidly growing amounts of diverse content, Web and intranet developers and managers scramble for an effective solution. Web and intranet developers often adopt the most familiar tools at hand from the software configuration management or document-management areas. In other cases, they turn to a growing number of tools specifically intended to address the challenge of Web content management.
No tool does it all and none is right for everyone, but with the growing array of available options, there should be an appropriate solution for each company.
There have been no highly publicized instances of companies pressured to honor out-of-date promotions mistakenly left on their Web sites, regulated financial disclosures inadvertently posted prematurely, or other embarrassing instances reflecting the failure of content management.
But such events are bound to happen. As companies execute highly sophisticated content strategies that involve personalizing content, combining content from third parties, and coordinating the presentation of time-sensitive content, failures of content management are likely to become more common and more painful.
Web content management entails the collection, assembly, and management of content for publishing on an intranet, extranet, or Web site. It addresses version control, content security, review, and approval. The goal is to automate what has been a cumbersome, manual process prone to delays, bottlenecks, and errors. It differs from Web-site manage-yed iment, which focuses on navigation, performance, availability, scalability, and security of the site.
continued...page 2, 3, 4
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