Web Compliance Standards

In his AIIM 2010 Keynote presentation, John Mancini talks about a variety of "disruptive forces" that will transform the CM industry. Among many other factors, he cites the following:

•    A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
•    Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
•     A "transfer of experiences... with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT"
•    A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems

What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic "everything you'll ever need" contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality - which may only crudely represent a customer's specific needs - or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation - like any system - to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:

1. It must address the specific needs of its users.
2. Those needs are going to change over time.

Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their  'all-in-one' systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming "data deluge". Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.

Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you'll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter and The Onion, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa's Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.

Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance - ECoG) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.

W3C, WCAG, Section 508, Double-A, XHTML Strict, Dublin Core, EDRM, ISO 9000… if you have a role in managing compliance within your organization – particularly as it relates to delivery of web content for internal or public consumption – chances are high that at least some of these terms are familiar to you. As argued in recent Vamosa blog posts from Moayyed Darugar and Paul Henderson, companies have a legal or ethical obligation to maintain compliance with some accepted standards, which all basically boil down to making sure the right information is disclosed and making sure that disclosed information is accessible. The software tools marketplace abounds with point solutions addressing compliance issues in each of these categories. But in addition to the universal standards, it’s likely that your organization has its own policies and protocols with their own set of motivations. What is your technology doing to address these?

It’s quite likely that your organization has many guidelines and procedures for managing your web and document content which are not reinforced by the technologies used to do that management. If you do have tools in place to address these focused objectives, it’s likely that they are integrated clumsily into your CMS or disjointed entirely… a cobblestone of macros. Even worse, some of the bricks in your road to compliance may be feature-rich applications from which you only need one or two functions; expensive bricks indeed! Taking a blue-sky view of the problem, it should be evident that the way to effectively manage your content’s compliance to both good-corporate-citizen standards and company-specific policies is to do so from a unified console giving you a view of exactly the policies you want to manage, and only those.

In the enterprise, there’s no such thing as a technology problem. There are only business problems to be solved with technology. This means that for a technical solution to be viable, its design, deployment, and usage must be fully aligned with the business issue it addresses. Producing this kind of solution is virtually impossible for a traditional software manufacturer: a precisely targeted solution limits the market, and a generic solution is bloatware that no one wants.  Building a tailor made solution, based on a standard software platform however, is exactly what has established Vamosa as a leader in Enterprise Content Governance. By offering a rules-based engine, Vamosa allows organizations to build robust, custom  solutions to govern compliance to their specific standards, with help on hand from the Vamosa Expert Services Team.

Whether you’re suffering blemishes on your corporate façade or fissures in the foundation of your business Vamosa offers a flexible solution.