Opinion

Promise of Information Lifecycle Management

Establishing content and process management software technology as infrastructure components increases their overall value to the business. Recognizing this factor is essential to successfully deploying content and business process management tools.

By No Analyst or Consultant

July 18, 2005 — CSO — By Ellen Reilly, Managing Director

and

Marcia Douglas, Senior Manager

Businesses are constantly challenged to design, deploy and optimize technology solutions that improve operational efficiency, enable business decision-making, promote the customer experience, and contribute to revenue generation and profitability. The effort to become more agile and flexible in the alignment of business and technology has driven companies to re-examine how to leverage solutions within the enterprise infrastructure. Establishing content and process management software technology as infrastructure components increases their overall value to the business. Recognizing this factor is essential to successfully deploying content and business process management tools.

Content and process management technologies are often deployed as point solutions. Specific business areas such as loans processing, mortgage application and renewal, new account openings, insurance claims processing (life, health and property/casualty), regulated drug submissions, medical patient files, land registry records, human resource recruitment, personnel performance management, time and expense claims, unemployment insurance payments, income tax payments, and accounts payables/receivables, have been candidates for content and process enablement. Traditionally, each business area would initiate a project, define requirements, select software and implement itcompletely in isolation from other projects. The result is that numerous similar software products are used throughout the organization.

To optimize the investment in content and process management technologies requires recognizing these tools as fundamental infrastructure components for the enterprise. This means providing a common platform within a services oriented architecture for content and process management. Content and process management become available to all areas of the organization and development efforts leverage common service components. Service Oriented Architecture is an approach to development of re-usable system components and frameworks.

These re-usable components or services are assembled together using loosely coupled communications to form applications and solutions. This facilitates future change in the business process without necessarily requiring change in the services. The net result of increased agility and reusability of components is reduced development and maintenance costs for content and business process solutions.

Further integrating content and process management into the infrastructure must encompass linking Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). ECM encompasses managing all forms of content assets (paper documents, office application files, images, web pages, electronic reports, video, audio, etc.) from creation through use, storage and disposition. ILM is, as yet, an embryonic set of technologies intended to enable content to be moved through a continuum of storage media. The objective is to meet business service level needs for storage access and retrieval at the lowest possible unit cost for storage. ILM can be enabled according to key content parameters such as content age, date last accessed, content size, etc.