Mastering content complexity
Castle turned to a CM (content management) system from IBM that is enabling Atlanta-based CNN to store, catalog, and manage videos in a digital system that is available across the company. The new system, Castle says, “is really going to change the way people think about content and how to access it. We have millions and millions of dollars of content, and it has been hard to get at it. This will have a dramatic effect on the efficiency of our business.”
Castle is not the only one praising CM systems these days. CM is hot. It is drawing increasing attention from enterprises as a strategic tool for integrating information from across organizations and for opening content to customers and partners as well. Tired of tracking multiple data repositories, companies now see in CM a way to streamline and simplify data management. A key element in this strategy, analysts say, is the use of the portal as a focal point for Web-based content delivery, usually using XML as a unifying language.
Meta Group estimates that the enterprise CM market will exceed $10 billion in 2004. With such potential, traditional CM players such as Autonomy, divine, Interwoven, and Vignette as well as major vendors including IBM and Microsoft are pushing ahead to capture the growing business. CNN’s Castle and other CTOs from diverse organizations such as the University of Maryland’s business school, publisher McGraw-Hill, and engineering company Foster Wheeler are adopting CM for their own uses.
At CNN, Castle says he is using IBM’s Media Production Suite to build a digital video library and management system that can act as a central location for accessing video.
“Getting at the content internally at CNN has been pretty difficult,” Castle says. “We put a lot of content out as streaming media on the Web, but we are limited by the workflow process, which requires people to get tapes and put it out into the streaming media process.” The new system will digitize, catalog, store, distribute, and retrieve more than 150,000 hours of archival material.
In early 2003, CNN plans to extend and enhance the CM system using IBM’s Enterprise Information Portal, Content Manager, and MQ Series messaging tool. This second phase will further connect and open up the CM system across the enterprise and access other content types, including text files.
“It will manage assets of any type,” Castle says. “Not only will this have a dramatic effect on how we do production inside CNN, but we will be able to offer content to external users of CNN.”
Simplifying content access
Sandor Boyson, CTO of the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park, is deploying Autonomy’s CM suite to redesign the information flow for his 5,000 users. Autonomy provides a layer within the enterprise, called IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer), which allows the school to automatically process digital content and allow applications to communicate with one another.
“By August, we will be replacing our IT infrastructure with a portal infrastructure that will have Autonomy as its content management tool,” Boyson says.
The campus now has multiple Web sites and directories that are not directly linked. “We will use Autonomy to go out to the various databases and Web sites and link them to our portal,” Boyson says. “Autonomy spiders are going out and searching for data and bringing it back to the portal.”
Boyson says the CM platform will be foundation for the goal of overall integration of many of the school’s applications, including those for HR and financial information.
“The data search is essentially an inference engine that uses not just key words but the context of the content,” Boyson says. “It has a learning capacity. There are different ways you can link information to a portal. One way is to use middleware where you link your portal to the back-end databases and applications. This is a hard-wire link. But if your data source is Web-based instead of hard-wired, you can send agents out to these [disparate] URLs and scoop up content and bring it back in HTML files and place it in the portal layer through the browser.”
Boyson has combined 16 different sign-ons currently used by students into a single sign-on anchored by the portal. “We think the portal will be our view into all our enterprise information and data sources, will bring them to common database and [common] view, and [will] bring tools to analyze that information and allow sophisticated information-gathering,” he says.
Victor Salicetti, CTO of Clinton, N.J.-based Foster Wheeler, a design, engineering, and construction company, says his company began in December using vendor divine’s Content Management Portal to help replace nine intranets with a single Web site. “The portal will be used for employees to access company information about procedures, our best-practices databases, vacations, human resources, and our global project numbers,” he says. “We set up an integration framework so we can connect to applications via XML, middleware, and database links.”
The next step, Salicetti says, will be to extend the system for remote access to the company’s 7,000 employees and then to open it to customers and partners.
Redesigning workflow
At McGraw-Hill, the implementation of a CM system about 18 months ago resulted in a change that was “night and day,” says Ernie Miller, McGraw-Hill’s chief architect for information and media services, which publishes magazines, newsletters, and online content.
“We’re an information company, and CM has to be a core competency. It’s our primary asset,” Miller says. “We are beginning to outstrip the business and [management’s] ability to come up with a new business model. It’s a great place to be.”
Miller deployed a platform suite from Interwoven that includes applications for content management, collaboration, and versioning; automated deployment; and tagging for content classification and categorization.
The previous method of publishing documents took about 50 clicks; it now takes four, Miller says. “We didn’t like the time we were taking on generating assets and managing them from creation to distribution and even to syndicated channels,” he says. Since its inception, the new system has seen publication of more than 11,000 articles through print, online, video, and newsletters.
Interwoven’s suite manages editorial workflow and authoring. “It’s a pipeline to send content to the Web site or to the newsletters for publication or to a database or file system where it can be accessed,” Miller says. “The key thing is to take the Web site out of the hands of the technicians and put it in the hands of the business people.”
Along with Interwoven, McGraw-Hill used Artsia for digital assets management, Autonomy for search capability, and systems from BEA and Microsoft, such as Microsoft .Net.
“There is not one centrally managed area, so we are putting in place a federated system so each group can, in a similar manner, find a final resting place of the content… . The key is to release the content from its resting place and use it as more of an asset,” Miller says. “The magazine is merely a means by which you distribute content, which is itself the asset. We want to leverage content like any asset.”
