TrendAlert: Discontent In The Land Of Content - The Content Integration Challenge

Today's enterprises house many types of content, but few knowledge workers have easy access to all the content they need for their work. This Briefing focuses on enterprise content integration and offers a holistic approach that recognizes that knowledge workers need access to information in all of its forms. It discusses the disconnect between unstructured and structured data and outlines ways for enterprises to begin moving toward a unified view of content, including a discussion of key vendors and tools. The Briefing describes how structured content has become the domain of IT organizations while unstructured text and content have largely been managed by business units and libraries, and how that division has hindered real progress toward content integration. It illustrates four potential approaches to enterprise content integration, and identifies innovative companies that are already providing pieces of the content integration puzzle. For commercial content vendors, this Briefing advises a proactive move toward XML and Web Services that will make their offerings part of an enterprise 'suite' of content and integration tools. For content deployment professionals, the Briefing prescribes an entirely new mindset and approach to information architectures in their organizations. For content software technology vendors, Outsell sees a huge gap between the number of products focused on a small niche of the integrated content universe, and the far too few that address the bigger picture.