The Parable of “the Information Age”

To quote Charles Dicken’s from the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. As the amount of available information (physical and digital) continues to grow and thereby create knowledge and opportunity…the very real challenge of taking advantage of all this information, grows as well. As we’ve moved squarely into the information age (dare I say digital age), organizations large and small have faced several new challenges with the creation, distribution, consumption and management of content – both paper-based as well as digital. Fortunately, the capabilities and the technology of enterprise content management (ECM) have evolved dramatically over the past few years and are now moving beyond the easy knee-jerk reaction of “buying a bigger SAN”.

Historically, content management applications were used to address separate lines of business (LOBs) like Finance, Legal & Compliance, Human Resources, Sales, IT infrastructure and Web needs – all of which have specific functional needs but also basically perform very similar functions. These previously disparate systems are converging and now capable of addressing the needs of the entire organization – on one platform. This eliminates or at least greatly reduces integrations and cost redundancies while at the same time provides a solid infrastructure ( or Content Service) that promises to minimize or eliminate the costs of separate systems, support, development and integrations, improve user experience and productivity, and simplify upgrades, maintenance and training. This new “Unified” approach returns a tremendous return on investment (ROI) and in a much shorter time than the current “Band-Aid” or “Patchwork” solutions.

Unified ECM provides the full array of ECM functionality – including document and imaging management, records and retention management, Web content management, and digital asset and information rights management all on one platform - by leveraging a common set of content services that are shared across independent content management applications…and that will provide rapid ROI to most organizations.

Put us to the test: We’ve created a ROI Calculator and Assessment engagement that I guarantee is worth the time and effort to try. We’ve also partnered with Oracle/Stellent on this so that the cost of the Assessment will be credited back to your Organization if you ultimately choose Oracle as your platform for Unified ECM.