Content Management can yield 400% ROI. (IT News).According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Butler Group's recent hi-Depth Report 'Content Management Getting to Grips with the Information Explosion', content is an essential part of the business infrastructure. Having moved beyond the management of web sites, content management now encompasses e-commerce, e-mails, catalogues, technical documents, audio and video, databases, reports, and a vast array of structured and unstructured data Data that does not reside in fixed locations. Free-form text in a word processing document is a typical example. Contrast with structured data. See free-form database. . Comment: 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 organisation." 'Unstructured content, such as e-mails, images and documents, account for over 80 percent of data in a typical business. Without the ability to organise this content, the information contained within it is lost, and a valuable asset is wasted.' "Our of date content can be positively harmful to a business - for financial, legal or competitive reasons. Most importantly Adv. 1. most importantly - above and beyond all other consideration; "above all, you must be independent" above all, most especially , properly managed content should be viewed as a competitive weapon - it allows us to create more compelling information services See Information Systems. , to connect to suppliers and partners, and to find new market places for our products and services. However in times of tight budgets and cost cutting can Content Management really be justified and if so, what level of return on investment (ROI (Return On Investment) The monetary benefits derived from having spent money on developing or revising a system. In the IT world, there are more ways to compute ROI than Carter has liver pills (and for those of you who never heard of that expression, it means a lot). ) will it yield? "in times of economic downturn Downturn The transition point between a rising, expanding economy to a falling, contracting one. downturn A decline in security prices or economic activity following a period of rising or stable prices or activity. , don't invest in applications, invest in infrastructure. Content is amajor 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." ROI ROI is not just the initial cost of the application, users must count annual licence 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 au·to·mate v. au·to·mat·ed, au·to·mat·ing, au·to·mates v.tr. 1. To convert to automatic operation: automate a factory. 2. 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 thc costs incurred in changing an average web site of 5000 HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. pages, compared with the same task using Content Management software. www.buttergroup.com |
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