Manufacturers can save as much as 20% of their enterprise content management (ECM) costs by moving to a shared services model, according to analyst Gartner. Mark Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner, says that shared services are now a practical way for companies to provide ECM services, and that vendors under pressure from the economy are now more willing to work this way.
"Businesses have long struggled with multiple ECM deployments, which have, in turn, created information silos and caused [them] to pay for separate sets of software licenses, maintenance and support skills for too many ECM vendors," says Gilbert.
"The troubled economy has forced many IT organisations to cut ECM costs, but traditional approaches to consolidating are slow, complex and costly. The shared services – or ECM as a service – approach promises at least a partial solution," he explains.
In practice, it works by an organisation purchasing ECM functions centrally and governing the types of services offered, while granting users a degree of ownership.
The business itself, or cloud-based service providers, can deliver these functions over the Internet, in much the same way as service-orientated architectures (SOAs) make reusable software procedures are identifiable and callable. Shared services may also include support from experts on a particular topic, computing infrastructure and reference architectures.
Gilbert reckons that information architects and business planners involved with ECM should consider the benefits and limitations of shared services, whether they are practical today and the steps involved in implementation.
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