Gartner is advising that the use of shared-services for enterprise content management can help reduce costs by as much as 20%.
“Businesses have long struggled with multiple ECM deployments which have, in turn, created information silos and caused businesses to pay for separate sets of software licenses, maintenance and support skills for too many ECM vendors,” it said.
In shared services ECM functions are purchased and managed centrally and delivered over the internet or enterprise WAN.
With the exponential growth in the amount of unstructured content as well as compliance exposures that all that content can bring, enterprise content management is becoming a priority within many organisations.
Content management has begun to be recognised as an enterprise-wide priority rather than something that is deployed as a system to meet departmental needs.
It ranges from basic store-and-retrieve capabilities, to services that include revision-control and automated workflow capabilities.
Suppliers such as IBM recommend the establishment of an ECM centre of excellence is the best way to succeed with an ECM shared services initiative, arguing that as well as the need to develop technology services such as content capture, repository, discovery, compliance, and business process management, there is also a need for support services like administration, governance, business process management.
Gartner said the benefits of a shared-service approach include economies of scale, reuse of infrastructure, interoperability across the enterprise, speed of deployment, information sharing, and improved credibility for the IT organisation.
There’s a need to standardise on a single ECM product or vendor platform, and establish a governance model for service and support, it recommends as a first step.
