Repurposing - Enterprise Content Management's best kept secret

Recent AIIM research has found that while companies are adopting new approaches to creating and capturing content, they have not been as quick to adopt innovative delivery and publishing methods. When asked the degree to which content is repurposed, 45% of survey respondents indicated "minimally" or "not at all." Another 28% indicated that content was only "somewhat" repurposed.

Just as important, and perhaps reflective of this, survey respondents indicated that any repurposing which is being undertaken is fairly elementary such as "mail-merging" policies and agreements, as opposed to dynamically generating complex documents such as contracts or technical manuals from a pool of standard text components.

On the other hand, 57% of those who are repurposing content indicate that a main driver is cost reduction, with other studies indicating potential savings of up to 30%. A further 51% indicated that they achieve more effective communication and 45% achieve better quality control. Modern component authoring systems are based on highly flexible, XML-tagged, content-component databases, but these are only used in 17% of responding organisations. 

Doug Miles, AIIM's UK managing director, comments: "Most organisations now understand how ECM (Enterprise Content Management) systems can help to find and control complete documents, but the productivity and quality benefits to be gained from component re-use is considerable in any organisation that produces variant documents of predominantly standard text - and that would include most marketing, legal, procurement and technical operations. Early component authoring products were clumsy to use, but with more modern XML-based products, persuading technical authors to change their way of working is likely to be much easier."

The full AIIM Market IQ report: "Content Creation and Delivery - the On-Ramps and Off-Ramps of ECM" can be downloaded free at http://www.aiim.org.uk/research and was supported by Abbyy, Kodak, Mark Logic, Thunderhead and Visioneer.

AIIM is the international community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organisations find, control, and optimise their information.