9/21/2007

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My background as a consultant is in the intersection of enterprise management of structured data, unstructured data, applications, and services. These have all been separate concerns for too long, claimed respectively by enterprise DBAs, content managers, software architects, and business process managers.

More and more, people are understanding how these disciplines need to come together, as evidenced by the emergence of service-oriented architecture -- which aligns applications more closely with services -- and the effort of enterprise database systems to accommodate unstructured data. I've watched this slow convergence, but since it comes too slowly to meet many practical needs in business, I've often had to find my own strategies for connecting these worlds. In my experience the sweet spot for such work depends on the nature of the organization, but most often lies in content management (CM).

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The goal of CM is to establish a writing shop, publishing house, and library for an organization. The material produced might be for communication to the outside, Web publishing for example, or it might be for internal knowledge, as in the case of enterprise CM.

The hardest problem in managing such a combination of concerns is maintaining agreements and policies, which is why most CM processes and technology focus on workflow. CM workflow is now a fairly mature science, and it fits comfortably into related business processes. From an information management point of view, however, CM tools are just beginning to seek differentiation by their ready integration into structured databases, and general applications and services.

The key to such integration is in sharing content metadata with other systems. The richer the metadata shared, the more value created in the integrated result. Richness is a matter of how well the metadata is placed in context. Content tagged with a simple string "release" might indicate that it's written as a press release, or perhaps that it relates to software releases. Rich metadata minimizes ambiguity of such details, and clarifies the relationship between content and each property.

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