Content Management - Yes It Works, and It Is Here to Stay, But Do We Need It?

Butler Group says 'Yes' and an ROI of over 400 percent is possible!

According to Butler Group's recent In-Depth Report 'Content Management - Getting to Grips with the Information Explosion', content is king, or if not king, an essential part of the business infrastructure. Having moved beyond the simple management of Web sites, content management now encompasses e-commerce, e-mails, catalogs, technical documents, audio and video, databases, reports and a vast array of structured and unstructured data.

Do we need it? Yes! says Butler Group, content is an integral part of every business process, and is fundamental to the operation of those processes. Failure to manage all types of content ignores its importance within the organization.

It is claimed, in the latest Report from Butler Group, '…unstructured content, such as e-mails, images and documents account for over 80 percent of data in a typical business. Without the ability to organize this content, the information contained within it is lost, and a valuable asset is wasted.'

Tim Jennings, Research Production Director, Butler Group added, "Out of date content can be positively harmful to a business - for financial, legal or competitive reasons. Most importantly, properly managed content should be viewed as a competitive weapon - it allows us to create more compelling information services, to connect to suppliers and partners, and to find new market places for our products and services. Content Management is here to stay".

But in times of tight budgets and cost cutting can Content Management really be justified and if so, what level of return on investment (ROI) will it yield?

Butler Group says in times of economic downturn, don't invest in applications, invest in infrastructure. Content is a major asset of a company and as such is part of the infrastructure. It will become increasingly important as Content Networking becomes widely accepted and provides a single end-to-end application that creates, manages and delivers content to the end-user.

So where's the ROI?

Butler Group explains that ROI is not just the initial cost of the application, you must count annual license fees, support, maintenance plus additional hardware and software. The ROI equation evaluates the costs of the process with a Content Management solution taking into account manual processes compared with automated and more cost effective processes.

An example cited by Butler Group points to savings of some 400 percent using a Content Management solution. This is based on the costs incurred in changing an average web site of 5000 HTML pages, compared with the same task using Content Management software.

Much of the ROI depends on the sophistication of the task but in all cases an immediate return is easily achievable and demonstrable to senior management. This combined with faster, more accurate content, much faster time to market with web-based content and more effective management of the process makes Content Management worthy of a very serious look.