BY AMT Knowledge Management Research Group
What is content management?
Content management, English name is Content Management, is a hot technology and application in the industry. For this emerging technology, there is no unified definition in the industry. For example, Gartner Group believes that content management includes internal content management, web content management, e-commerce transaction content management, and corporate external network information sharing content management, which is a general classification from the content range and form angle. Giga Group regards content management as an e-commerce content engine that consists of content management and e-commerce servers to form content production, delivery (Delivery), and e-commerce end-to-end system. Merrill Lynch believes that content management focuses on corporate employees, corporate users, partners, and suppliers to access non-structured information, with the purpose of publishing unstructured information to intranet, extranet, and ITE (Internet Trading Exchanges) User users can retrieve, use, analyze, and share.
We believe that as the name suggests, content management consists of two parts, "content" emphasizes the object, and "management" emphasizes the method. What is the content? The content is essentially any type of digital information, which can be text, graphic image, web page, business document, database form, video, sound file, etc. It should be said that the content is a broader concept than data, documents, and information is the polymerization of various structured data, non-structured documents, and information, and some knowledge also contains knowledge. What is management? Management is a series of processing processes applied on the "Content" object, including collection, confirmation, approval, finishing, positioning, conversion, distribution, update, archiving, etc., the purpose is to make "content" can be in the correct time to correct The form is passed to the right place and people. In this way, we may give content management next to the content: Content management is to assist organizations and individuals, with information technology, implement content, store, share, apply, update, and in business, organization, business, strategy, etc. The process of generating value in terms of aspects. The content management system is a combination of tools or a set of tools that can support content management.
Is the content management only a technical concept?
If the content management system is a technology, then content management is not just a technical concept. Because effective content management is not enough by an excellent content management system, it is very simple to say: a set of good systems, no one is willing to use it, but it is just a piece. Effective content management first depends on the culture of the willingness to share the content, on this basis, combined with the enterprise business process, the content creation, storage, sharing, application, update, and developing the relevant management mechanism is the second. The content management system is supported as a technology, just the third.
So some extent and the discussion of knowledge management, talk about the content management system, you can discuss many technologies, such as XML, data warehouses, business intelligence, etc .; but if you talk about content management, then just talk technology is a big misunderstanding .
Why do you want content management?
Sth, why do you want to manage content? We can see two data, a survey of Gartner Group in September 2000: Average Each knowledge worker takes 8 hours a week to handle the content of the document processing, including documentation, find, finishing Wait. The Forrester Research also gives a statistical data that shows that the content is increased in 200% per year. On the one hand, the low content processing efficiency is the amount of content that constantly expands. This simple fact comparison has implicit an urgent need for the company: we need to effectively manage our content.
From a deeper, the following points are the main factors that lead to content management requirements: (1) The coming of knowledge economy is coming, making people recognize the huge value of information and knowledge for enterprises. However, the data and information of dispersion, confusion cannot be integrated, and it must be integrated into organized content to make full value. (2) Business application puts an urgent need for content management. At present, people talk about collaborative business, including inter-corporate interior and departments, or business between enterprises, including suppliers, partners, distributors, service providers, customers, etc.. Content management is in terms of the interior of the enterprise, and the value-added utilization of information can be achieved well, and is also an integral part of the truly collaborative business. It can be said that effective content management is an important guarantee for achieving good integration relationship management. (3) Time competition also requires content management. Some people say that knowledge is more than just wealth, and instant knowledge is at least equal to the square of wealth. This sentence is equally applicable to content. As early as 1988, Xiao Georg Stoke pointed out that time will become the next competitive advantage; in 1997, the US scientific and technological product marketing masters, "Relationship Marketing", the author, Rising, McCanna, was established. " Real-time company, calling on corporate managers to create a customer who is good at induced to meet the "never-satisfaction". In order to be able to quickly and efficiently respond to customers, content management is essential, for example, in CRM, customer content management is a very important part. Figure 1 Content management
As we can see from Figure 1, content management can not only enable companies to directly implement "content value added" directly to content, but also achieve effective relationship management in collaborative business, and customer (internal and external) The rapid response of demand has played a unique role.
If a business is often troubled by the following questions, such as "How to find the current version of this document?", "How to store and classify thousands of documents?", "How to inform my customers in time?", "This The contract is confidential, how should I protect it? "," How to improve my work process? "And so on. At this point, you can consider performing content management, which will become a key to unlocking the lock of the company.
How to perform content management?
In order to make the content management really play, just as the above mentioned, it is not only a technical content management system to resolve, it is a "technology-social" project that combines people, processes, and technology. As shown in Figure 2, in terms of human claims, special content management mechanisms need to be established, assign specific content managers, content editing, etc.) to manage and maintain content; and in process, to establish transparent content management Procedure, including content, storage, sharing, application, and update, and closely combine content management process and specific business procedures to make the content "from the business, go to the business"; in terms of technology, mainly To establish a set of content management systems, provide technical support environments for content and content management process.
Figure 2 "Technology - Social" characteristics of content management
What is the function of the content management system?
The following focuses on the technical perspective to see the functions that the content management system should provide, as shown in Figure 3, a complete content management system includes the following sections: content warehouse, content search engine, content management function module, user interface, and content Access equipment, etc.
Figure 3 functional structure of the content management system
(1) Content warehouse is used to store various forms, such as documents, videos, audio files, etc. (2) The content search engine is the core functional module of the content management system to help users quickly locate the desired content. According to the search method, it can be divided into full-text search, context search, etc. Nowadays, more advanced search technology also includes intelligent knowledge retrieval technology, natural language query, etc. (3) Content Management Module is the main functional module of the content management system to provide support for content management, including: content creation and editing to achieve various data, information, documentation, and program acquisition and create content. Collaboration tools, such as documentation and web page production tools, data conversion (Metadata and XML) tools, etc. Personalization, personalization of content is an important feature of content management distinguish between traditional document management, including personalization according to user preferences, and control personalization according to content dependencies. Archive management to achieve secure storage, managing various forms of content. Workflow to achieve user-defined processes and roles-based process control, approval process, etc. Safety control, including database security control, encryption, copy, and propagation restrictions. Lifecycle management, mainly refers to the control of content, such as multi-version control, version tracking and other functions. (4) The user interface module includes a traditional non-Web-like graphical user interface GUI and a variety of ways of newly developed corporate information portal EIPs, and EIP will become the dominant way of future user interfaces. (5) Content access devices include mobile devices such as client computers and PDAs, mobile phones. What is the difference between content management and knowledge management?
The current knowledge management is also a hot topic, and many software vendors have launched a so-called knowledge management solution. We don't talk about the biased of knowledge management, just to see if content management and knowledge management are true? I think there is two different points between content management and knowledge management, one is the same and one connection.
From content management and knowledge management vocabulary, we can see a different point, that is, the management objects of both are different. The former is "content", the latter is "knowledge". As we mentioned earlier, the content is mainly collectively known for various structured data, non-structured documents, and information, and certainly includes knowledge, but this kind of knowledge is primarily a clarity. "Knowledge" not only contains clarity knowledge, but also has the miles' knowledge, and the latter has a greater extent of "knowledge" value.
The second point is that the two can be different in management functions. The term knowledge can also be verb, and the inflictrans are "strong", and the understanding of knowledge management is not only for static knowledge. (Knowledge Base) management also includes management of dynamic knowledge process, especially for the management of knowledge innovation. The famous knowledge management master is divided into a mall and clear two different types of knowledge, and believes that knowledge management has mainly manifested the management of knowledge spirals formed by mutual transformation between these two types of knowledge, including the transformation of the Mald Club For the knowledge of the knowledge of the mall, the knowledge of the knowledge of the Mail Cluster is converted to clear knowledge, and the knowledge association management of clear knowledge is converted into clear knowledge, and the intellectual intellectual intellectual intellectual Management. Savory content management is mainly the management of knowledge association process, which is about to disperse the data, information transforming into organized content and knowledge, basically does not have management functions for the Malf Club knowledge.
At present, many people still have a technical point of view of content management and knowledge management, and believe they are a natural expansion of document management, which is inaccurate. In fact, content management and knowledge management have the same point in management mechanism, that is, they are "technology-social" systems integrating people, processes, and technology. They also need to emphasize sharing culture, standard clear management process and Good technical support.
One connection between content management and knowledge management, mainly in content management can be used as a basic composition as knowledge management. In fact, many current knowledge management solutions, especially those solutions for clarity knowledge, including two parts, one is content management, and the other is infrastructure construction (including hard environment and soft environments). How can the content management develop?
The development of content management is today, and the time is not long, and its value has not been fully excavated, and it also has great development potential. Ovum Consulting divides content management into two areas of tools and services, and the market size of CM tools and services will be developed to $ 5.3 billion and $ 8 billion in 2004. At present, there are mainly two types of products in the CM software market, and a class of product functions is relatively rich. It is mainly for enterprise users, such as Microsoft, IBM and other companies to provide general platform-based CM solutions; there is also a special technical provider of content management, such as Verity provides knowledge retrieval, MicroMedia provides content creation platforms.
From the perspective of technical and application perspectives, I want to have the following trends, one is the continued expansion of the application; the second is to combine with business applications, and application integration will become a content management solution. The problem considering; the third is to further deepening the application; quad and knowledge management trends, and ultimately becoming an integral part of knowledge management solutions.
(1) Expansion of content management applications, mainly manifested as "e" -cm in two directions. The first "e" is Enterprise, which refers to the development of content management from office automation and certain local applications to the entire enterprise, forming corporate content management. Gartner Group gives the definition of corporate content management in 2001, which is positioned as "using technology to create, capture, distribute, customize, and manage the content throughout the company." Another "e" is e-business If the content management of enterprises mainly emphasizes the internal management of the enterprise, the content management of E-Business is mainly emphasizing the management of the entire content value chain in e-commerce transactions, enabling companies to achieve fullness between suppliers, partners, and customers. Content sharing.
(2) The combination of business applications is also an inevitable trend of content management development, as content management is ultimately to serve specific business processes. This is a large extent, an integration problem of systems and applications, which need to eliminate the boundaries of obstructing content applications (such as ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.), enabling companies to fully understand market and user needs and make a rapid response. For example, in Microsoft's Content Management Server 2001 and CRM integration scenarios, customers enter personal feature information using the Web site, and the information stores in the CRM, and the Content Management Server 2001 accesses these data and manages the content accessed according to customer characteristics. If the customer characteristics change, the content submitted to the customer is also automatically changed.
Figure 4 gradual deepening of content management technology applications
(3) Deepening of technical applications in content management mainly manifests the introduction of more intelligent means, as shown in Figure 4. The current content management solution has basic functions such as retrieval, workflow, version control. The intelligence of processing is still not high; document automatic classification technology, text mining, Web mining, portal has a certain application, but must It also develops more intelligent content processing technology, such as semantic analysis, natural language understanding, intelligent agent, etc.
