EMC
partnership between Business and IT
The continuous
growth of information
presents a challenge to IT organizations
and, if it remains unchecked, will become
a crisis that impairs the ability of IT to
meet the strategic and business needs of
the organization. Information, including
structured data (typically stored in relational
databases) and unstructured content
(stored in file systems, content management
systems, email servers, and more), is growing
between 60 and 200 percent per year and
is generating a number of negative side
effects: storage costs draining IT budgets,
eDiscovery costs paralleling the explosion
in growth, and employee productivity limited
by time wasted searching for information
that is often never found and ends up
being recreated.
Since the majority of the information that
is accumulating is unstructured (up to 80
percent in some industries), content
management represents a critical technology
to help address this explosive growth. As
organizations consider the role of content
management in the broader information
management context, increasingly, they
are choosing to standardize on an ECiVl
platform in order to build an information
infrastructure across the enterprise, A
common infrastructure reduces the cost of
developing and deploying line-of-business
solutions, improves integration with business
applications, and enables the proactive
management of the information lifecycle.
The role of content management within
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is
to ensure that the most important information
assets—those that contribute to growth
and innovation—are identified, cared for,
and utilized to maximum effect, while still
containing information management costs.
Content management systems have long
been utilized to improve the efficiency of
critical business operations, but their
ability to manage information growth
represents an added opportunity for business
managers to improve corporate profitability
by productively partnering with IT
Why ILM is good for the organization and the
Line of Business (LOB)
Information management today contains
a disconnect. The business inherently
knows the value of the information—but
lacks a mechanism to identify and demarcate
that value, IT knows how to manage
aggregated groups of information but
cannot accurately apply service levels to
assets based on their business value.
Business managers who develop an
understanding of ILM activities such as
classifying and categorizing data, defining
information management policies, and
moving content between platforms and
service levels will help grow the
organization while protecting it from the
effects of ongoing content accumulation.
COST EFFICIENT ACCESS AND
AVAILABILITY
Ensuring the right information is
available at the right time for the right
people is a primary goal of your content
management system. Metadata about the
information, as captured and created by a
content management system, is crucial to
helping people find the information they
need. Metadata provide the "keywords"
and "describing words" that identify and
describe the content and can indicate its
value to the organization. For example, a
contract that is approved and is current
can be differentiated from a draft contract
or an annulled contract through the
metadata. Metadata can also help define
where an information asset is within its
lifecycle. As information moves through
its lifecycle its value to the business
changes. Information lifecycle
management plays an important role in
ensuring that the
business can reliably access the
information they need, by ensuring that IT
treats the information in a way that is
commensurate with the information's
importance to the line of business.
How IT handles a piece of information
can often be described in "service levels"
such as response time, recovery time,
retention periods, and risk of data loss.
High service levels can guarantee the
business has access to the information it
needs, but can be very costly, hence IT's
desire to use ILM practices to reduce their
overall costs.
Content management systems can help
on both the human side, by making it
easier to find information, and on the
physical side, by moving the content to a
storage device with sen/ice level agreements
that align IT costs with information value.
This not only ensures the business has
what it needs, but saves money—most
visibly when IT departments "charge-back"
their costs to the line of business,
COMPLIANCE AND CONTROL
Compliance is a requirement for the
organization, but can be a burden on the
line of business. Content management
systems, which inherently bring content
under greater control, can help fulfill
compliance mandates by identifying
which pieces of information must be
controlled or retained and by enforcing
those policies. But IT also plays a part by
providing the appropriate service levels to
 EMC'
where information lives'
ensure there isn't a technical break-down
that would cause the organization to
fall out of compliance. Pairing the
content management system with ILM
practices results in a policy-driven IT
architecture that ensures the right
information is preserved and allows an
organization to respond quickly and
confidently to regulatory or legal scrutiny.
Why platform standardization makes sense
Organizations are increasingly looking to
standardize on a content management
platform that will meet the largest number of
needs for the greatest number of projects,
while handling the workload volume that an
enterprise-wide approach requires. There are
three main drivers of this shift away from
introducing multiple, varied-point solutions:
compliance, cost-savings, and collaboration.
Compliance requirements exist across every
department within the organization, and
addressing them with one-off projects or
applications can cost an organization ten
times more than addressing those same
regulations with an integrated solution.
Second, organizations that standardize on a
common repository, tool set, and
development environment can achieve
substantial cost savings from reduced
development, administration, and training
costs. Lastly, collaboration across the entire
content value chain or business process will
inherently span multiple departments, A
unified platform wiil produce greater
productivity enhancements since the
commonality underneath the client interfaces,
the security and access models, and the
business processes will eliminate integration
barriers which would otherwise impede inter-
departmental collaboration.
Organizations that have taken the platform
approach can develop default configuration
templates that incorporate the company
standards and include re-usable components
that can be tailored to new initiatives as
they emerge. Generic departmental
workflows are easily customized for the
appropriate approvals and to ensure the
right parties get involved. These standards
make it easier and faster for IT to deploy
new applications; however, the real return
on investment occurs when the business
units utilize the tools to share information
and improve efficiency.
Why EMC is the right choice
EMC Documentum provides the industry's
broadest set of capabilities on a common
unified platform. Virtually every tool you
need to improve information management
is available within the Documentum content
management stack. And, the
Documentum application is standards-
based, with mature, well-documented APIs
and the largest community of systems
integrators and developers with deep
experience in content management,
Documentum also provides unique
capabilities that connect content
management to physical information
management, EMC Documentum Content
Intelligent Services can analyze and
auto-classify content assets generating
valuable descriptive metadata. Records
Manager can lock down and retain assets
for regulatory compliance. Finally,
Documentum Content Storage Services
uses the metadata, retention policies, and
workflows or lifecycles to tie content assets
to the right storage device and service
level. Working together, these capabilities
help bridge the gap between the LOB and
IT, and promise to revolutionize the
management of information to reflect and
maximize the business value of information.
Summary
Information use is critical to the
success of any organization and
information management is the
mandate of all IT departments. By
finding the commonalities between these
two objectives, business and IT can
effectively assist each other while
pursuing their primary goals and the
organization wins overall. Cooperation is
simplified with an enterprise-wide
platform for content management, since
the back-end connections can be built
once and are then easily triggered by
new departmental solutions.
Standardizing on an enterprise-class
content management system will
enable you to form an organizational
competency around content
management that can and will
positively change the way people do
their jobs. Standardizing on EMC's
Documentum content management
platform adds the benefit of ILM cost
savings and enables a productive
partnership between business and IT
that will accelerate growth and keep
you ahead of your competition, D
EMC CORPORATION (NYSE: EMC) is the world
leader in products, services, and solutions for
information management and storage that
help organizations extract the maximum
value from their information, at the lowest
total cost, across every point in the
information lifecycle. Information about
EMC's products and services can be found at
www,EMC,com
7b learn ynore about enterprise content
management or information lifecycle
management, visit us online at
www,EMC,com or call 1,866,464,7381
(outside the U,S,: +1,508,435,1000),