When it Comes to ROI, Integration Matters Too

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Many companies have their goals mapped out: use of content management software influences the desire to develop enterprise portals and vice versa. Developing a portal without content management software is inconceivable.

Yet, at a time when IT budgets are increasingly stretched, the question of ROI (return on investment) is more pressing than ever, especially when many roads lead to "Rome", i.e. could lead to a cross-corporate portal.

In fact, it is not always cross-discipline and very cost-intensive application and process integration that leads to success. The latest generation of content management software, which provides unlimited real-time access to all structured and unstructured data, may already make expensive EAI installations that operate a linkage at process level only obsolete before they ever really become current. Specialists such as Day, Verity, Hummingbird or Plumtree are already challenging big IT companies such as IBM, SAP, BEA or Computer Associates in the portal market.

What do "Big Bertha" and aspirin have in common? Quite a lot - the 420 mm, long-barrelled gun "Big Bertha", with a range of 300 yards, is truly one of the most famous First World War weapons. It was used to bombard fortifications such as the forts at Verdun. This weapon is indissociably linked with the name of its manufacturer - Krupp.

History records not just "Big Bertha", but Krupp's Big Bertha. There again, Bayer's success started in 1897 when, for the first time salicylic acid was refined in a chemically pure and stable form to give acetyl salicylic acid, which was then named aspirin. Today 14 billion tablets sold make aspirin the market leader in Europe and Latin America. Aspirin is a Bayer AG brand in more than 80 countries worldwide. To many people, aspirin is Bayer, and vice versa.

Corporate images are characterized to a great extent by companies' products, which in turn become brands. In the Internet age, in addition to its "real life" image, a company also has a "virtual image" which, in future, will determine the actual, i.e. true image of a company.

It is only with a successful Internet site that a company such as Bayer AG can show the world that, as a brand, Bayer is more than just aspirin. It is no exaggeration to say that a representative website has become more important than a representative headquarters location. Indeed, nowadays, a website is no longer just a business card, it is used increasingly as a sales tool, as support for the organizational cohesion of multi-national companies and is the place where company employees seek and find their identity. The web pages of the bigger companies have become accordingly complex: tens of thousands of pages initially have to be updated and maintained. The bigger companies' home pages often mutate quickly into DIY portals, intended to open up the most varied corporate resources to in-house employees and associates.

However, as American investment bank Merrill Lynch discovered in its regular survey of American and European CIOs, reticence continues to characterize IT investment, yet there are rays of hope in the IT market including, in addition to IT security, the areas of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and realization of e-commerce projects.

Fittingly, in spring of this year, the Meta Group noted that corporate portals will, in the near future, assume a "mission critical" nature, i.e. they will become indispensable to a company's daily business. In the case of major companies, portal development heads the IT "to do" list. According to Meta analysts' findings, 85 of the so-called Global 2000 companies are already planning to establish an enterprise information portal by the year 2003. In the next few years more than ten billion dollars will be directed towards portal projects. In the opinion of the Meta Group, most content and knowledge management projects will also end in realization of portal plans.

The Aberdeen Group too, which at the end of 2001 surveyed the purchasing plans for 2002 of more than 150 IT buyers discovered that, with 45 percent of all votes, content and document management topped the IT shopping list, alongside IT security. A clear indication that, in the interim, companies are both struggling to cope with maintaining their websites and that they have recognized the value of the information stored in the widest possible range of applications to be business-critical for their own company.

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