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Forrester's Connie Moore: "The World of Content Management is Changing"
Connie Moore, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, specializes in enterprise content management, as well as business process and information and knowledge management. She recently participated in a Q&A session with Oracle to discuss her vision for the future of content management—including Oracle's pioneering database approach.
What are the main business drivers Forrester sees for content management?
Business executives are interested in three things. They are looking for productivity and efficiency, compliance, and increasing top-line revenue growth. The IT organization is interested in leveraging its IT infrastructure and lowering maintenance costs.
On average, what percentage of an organization's data is unstructured content, and how much of that is typically manager controlled?
Much of the data in an organization is unstructured content—say, 80 to 85 percent. And of that unstructured content, 90 percent is not under control, especially if we're talking about workgroups and teams that are creating documents for collaborative purposes.
From a business perspective, why should organizations be concerned with managing their unstructured content?
Unstructured content is all over the organization. It's on your hard disk. It's in your e mail folders. It's in file systems. It's in many places. And there's no single version of the truth, because everyone has stored his or her own version. From an IT perspective, this is very hard to manage, and it's very costly.
What have been the challenges to achieving widespread user adoption of traditional enterprise content management systems?
There are four reasons. First, a lot of the pure-play enterprise content management vendors are fairly small, and buyers are more comfortable going with the vendors they already work with.
That leads into IT infrastructure. Buyers want to leverage their existing infrastructure. They're concerned about proprietary repositories. And the third is cost. These systems have been historically very expensive. And then a fourth one is user acceptance, usability, resistance to change. And it's very difficult when systems are hard to use or not well integrated.
Is Oracle on the right track, using the database to manage unstructured content as well as structured data?
You know, the world of content management is changing, and it's not just unstructured content over here and data over here, and the two worlds will never meet. With XML documents on the scene, now we have self-describing documents that have structure. So it's getting blurred as to what's unstructured and what's data. We need to really think of this holistically and talk about managing information.
What's your view on the database approach to content management?
Oracle's announcement that content is going to be in the database is fascinating. There have been three phases in the development of enterprise content management. The first phase was acquisition or consolidation. Companies bought each other, and point solutions were gathered into the same company.
The second phase was rationalization. These suites weren't really suites, so companies had to redesign them to make them true suites. We've been in the bifurcation stage where we've had very high-end, very expensive content solutions but not much of an answer for teams or workgroups. And those products are available now.
In the next and final phase, the repository moves out of proprietary file systems and moves into industry standard databases. The DBMS companies will be in the content repository business, and ultimately the content players—the pure-play companies—will source their repositories from the DBMS vendors and give up their proprietary solutions.
What do you see are the primary benefits customers can expect from Oracle's content management solution over simply managing unstructured content in the database?
There are some compelling reasons to put content in a database as opposed to a proprietary file system. And it mainly has to do with abilities. By using content in a database, you get scalability, reliability, manageability, and security. You get a high performance system underpinning the content system.
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