Boston September 25, 2001 A new research report from Delphi Group projects solid growth ahead in the content and knowledge management industry.
Carl Frappaolo, Delphi Group's executive vice president said that content and knowledge management is emerging as a central component of business strategy as it is able to leverage functionalities like workflow and document management.
"Demands placed by an expansion of the business web while the state of the economy forces streamlining and cost reductions necessitates greater utilization of content management," explained Frappaolo. "This is not a case of companies scrapping old systems in favor of the latest software. Content already exists within organizations. Content Management technology is helping them exploit content to their benefit."
Approximately one-quarter of respondents to Delphi's survey have deployed content management applications either across their entire U.S. operations and/or globally.
In addition, respondents see there is a need to integrate a wide array of information sources with their content management applications.
"Many of these sources, such as e-mail, are not integrated at this time," explained Larry Hawes, a Delphi Group senior analyst. "Few organizations are competent at managing e-mail, but more will need to become adept because this communication channel and it's near cousin, instant messaging, are important sources of content and knowledge in the networked economy."
HTML pages are the primary source of digital information managed by content management systems. Web content has mushroomed in the past four years as the Internet and intranets have become dominant publishing media. This continues a trend that first manifested itself in the document management software market in late 1998.
A number of respondents had implemented content management systems with mixed results. Frappaolo said the companies that tried to integrate content management systems with legacy systems, like ERP and digital signatures, were disappointed. "The integration of multiple applications continues to be a major barrier to fluid e-business practice. We expect organizations will find this task easier as they deploy newer content management systems that are interoperable with application server- and standards-based computing architectures."
