Enterprise Content Management's BI Flavors

Enterprise content management (ECM) has always been a bit of a wallflower -- acknowledged as important, but emerging slowly and flourishing most in professional and service-oriented firms where collaboration and knowledge management are paramount. But ECM offers a lot that's beyond the capabilities of most business intelligence systems -- the ability to handle semi-structured data in diverse document formats, team collaboration, support for ad hoc working groups, and knowledge management. All are of growing interest in the world of BI.

The ECM wallflower is blooming with the emergence of four trends in IT:

In short, more timely, complete and trusted information is moving toward the head of the class in IT organizations.

ECM goals and services increasingly overlap with what is happening in the world of BI. Several BI vendors are delivering -- through data mining and text analytics -- unstructured and semi-structured data suitable for use in statistical, OLAP, and predictive analysis tools. Vendors are more frequently tapping ECM sources. BI also has been a driving force -- with scorecarding, performance metrics and business activity monitoring (BAM) -- in transforming dashboards and portals into the accepted display and presentation mode within organizations large and small.Moreover, the business process management (BPM) landscape has many overlaps among BI vendors, application server and middleware providers, and content management suppliers. The cross-platform, open, extensible nature of portals from such vendors as BEA, Cognos, Hyperion, SAS and many others is insurance against proprietary tools that may impose either server- or client-side dependencies to get the most out of a system.An Enterprise Content Management Profile

So let's look at some of the major vendors and trends that are "cross-fertilizing" ECM and BI. The top five or six ECM vendors -- such as Documentum, Filenet, IBM, Interwoven, OpenText and Vignette -- originated from a diverse range of technology areas, including:

These services cluster around a set of basic operations associated with all documents. But unlike with BI tools, these basic services are likely to be found in any ECM tools. They can be broken into roughly six major categories. Glance over these sets of functions and note the ones that you think have resonance with business intelligence:

Library Services, including:

Access and Security:

User Interface Services:

Content Storage and Delivery Services:

Workflow Management Services:

System Management Services:

ECM systems' functionality has become very broad in the past three to five years. The systems are attacking the problems of managing unstructured and semi-structured data that's locked in desktop application silos, and making that data available in portal and dashboard contexts.Such functions sound an awful lot like what BI is doing with scorecarding and performance measures. The versioning and version control parts of library services, above, could come in handy in the development of OLAP cubes, statistical analysis and custom reports. And ECM workflow functionality is strikingly similar to business activity monitoring and business process management.

BI doesn't require all of ECM's user interface services -- although borrowing some of its workgroup functionality could prove useful. BI has adopted and even shaped some ECM practices; but as seen below, BI is in the process of adopting many ECM methods.

BI Shapes The ECM Framework

The writing is on the wall -- much of the practice of BI will adopt substantial parts of the ECM framework. Some BI systems will become third-party content-creation interfaces working under an ECM framework. Others will make use of ECM services. At the same time, BI will help to shape workflow, metadata, and content-delivery services profoundly. The question of who arrives first at this larger set of services -- whether it be an ECM vendor like Documentum, an infrastructure vendor like BEA, or a BI player like Cognos -- is up in the air. But certainly, market forces are pushing vendors in this direction.

1) The duplication of services and near identical processing in some aspects of both BI and ECM are factors holding up not just initial costs of many BI packages (users who buy two or more BI or ECM packages are paying for some near-duplicate services) but also keeping ongoing operational costs high. Expertise has to be developed and maintained over so many similar but different systems and services.2) With ETL, XML, Java/J2EE and Web Services, the advantages of consolidating key ECM functions within tools could prove very compelling.

3) Major vendors including BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS and others are moving toward a coordinated framework among their BI, ERP, ECM and other enterprise application offerings.

Expect BI to become an integral part of a consolidated BI+ECM framework. And expect this convergence to happen within the next two to five years. Also do not be surprised if business activity monitoring, BPM, EAI and EII tools also start to draw on common routines and services and integrate with the BI+ECM cluster for things like metadata and interface system services.

Now Microsoft should leap on these notions, and say that's what it's been planning all along with Windows Services. IBM is likely to ditto that notion with its WebSphere Information Integration, as might Oracle with its Fusion middleware, and BEA with its Liquid Services. Look for integration, infrastructure and delivery of reliable and secure services to be the battleground for IT leadership in the next decade. Because BI leads the innovation and ROI parade, it will powerfully shape the emerging architectures.

Jacques Surveyer is an IT observer and speculates on these and broader ideas at his site Bookraft.com.0